


Tomorrow, Tomorrow and Tomorrow

by pprfaith



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer (TV), Highlander - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe, Ancient Beings Being Bad at Modern Morality, Angst, Buffy Insert, Buffy Time Travels to Pre-Historical Days, Consensual Infidelity, Discussions of Morality, F/M, Gore, Historical, Horsemen, I'm missing a million tags, Inaccurate Historical Everything, It's all rather ridic but thinks it's serious, M/M, Moresomes, Multi, Old Story Upload, Pre-Historical society, Religious Imagery, Threats of Rape/Non-Con, Threesomes, Time Travel, Torture, Trauma, Violence, War, discussions of religion, ficlet style, just tread carefully, non-linear story telling, past sins
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-18
Updated: 2018-11-18
Packaged: 2019-08-25 10:30:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 31,255
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16659496
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pprfaith/pseuds/pprfaith
Summary: Buffy and Methos, forever and ever and ever.(Upload of a chaptered fic written from 2008-2010. Heaviily edited and updated.)





	Tomorrow, Tomorrow and Tomorrow

**Author's Note:**

> As mentioned, I updated and edited the shit out of this. If you feel like there's something missing, that's the three chapters I killed. The writing is whittled down to less teenage-angst levels of poetry and a few facts have been changed. I'm also not 21 anymore and scared of writing unconventional relationships, so that's a lot less delicate.
> 
> That said, I added two new blurbs at the end and I've peaked my own interest again, so there might be more. 
> 
> As tagged, this is NON-LINEAR and I won't be ordering it. You're all adults, you can follow along.
> 
> ETA: I also have beef with the Horsemen all being white, in case you can't tell from the writing. I tried to make it a little less obviously terrible, but still. It's terrible. I hate it.

+

**No Salvation**

+

Her garb is not that of a nurse or nun, yet she walks unchallenged between the rows upon rows of rickety cots, stopping here and there, humming softly under her breath.

She wears all black, the better to hide the blood, but even in the abysmal lighting he can see the wet patches and stains on her dress and the vivid red smears on her hands, face and neck. But despite the gruesome picture she makes, her hair is the gold of sunlight caught and spun and the dying lads’ faces contort into approximations of smiles when she passes them by.

She holds their hands for a moment or two, whispering, sometimes singing softly in a lilting language he cannot identify across the space of the tent. She traces the outline of their faces, wipes their foreheads with the sweetness of a lover. Yet she brings no salvation.

Her path through the tent follows the doctor’s loosely, marked by those beds he does not stop at anymore. There is a bag softly swaying at her side whenever she walks, small and as black as her dress but filled with death. 

Her small hands stroke over lax red hair as she takes her leave from a lad that cannot be older than sixteen. Her circuit of the whole tent takes her maybe an hour. As she leaves his bed, she leaves him with another hour to live. 

From the entrance of the tent, he watches as she takes a few steps to the next bed, coming closer to his position and suddenly her quickening races down his spine like ice water. Blonde curls shift as she peers up at him through dark lashes, meeting his surprised gaze with her own cool green one. 

War is no place for women. War is no place for human beings, really. All this death and pain and blood. These days, he wonders how he could ever look upon a field of mud and mangled corpses and see glory and honor. Follies of youth, like so many things.

She breaks away from his gaze, focusing on the soldier beneath her hands, singing again, loud enough this time for him to hear. It is no language he has ever spoken or heard but there is an undertone, something that reminds him of desert peoples and harsh sands. From her bag of death she draws a syringe filled with clear liquid and – never stopping her song – plunges it into the lad’s arm, pressing down.

He closes his eyes, refusing to watch the young man’s death. It is not salvation she brings but mercy to those who can expect nothing else anymore, a last relief in a world that is without. 

The doctors are gone for the night, the nurses turn their heads away and so, he has been told, she walks every night through the infirmary tents, taking with her those lads that have no hope of recovery. An immortal gatherer of souls. He almost laughs at the irony but before the bitter sound can interrupt her gentle singing, he spins and leaves the stifling room, deeply inhaling the cold night air. 

Even out here he smells the blood and antiseptic and it makes his stomach turn. War is an abomination, _killing_ is an abomination, a perversion of nature, he has learned that by now. Animals kill to defend themselves and their young, to feed and survive. Only humans kill for land and riches. Only humans send children to die in the muck for the sake of their pride, their faith, their arrogance. 

At the soft rustling of the tent flap he turns, not really surprised to find the shape of her outlined against the infirmary lights. 

Hand on his sword, he nods his head at her and introduces himself, “I am Duncan MacLeod of the clan MacLeod.”

Her smile is the exhausted, wan and glib. “And I am tired, Duncan MacLeod of the clan MacLeod.”

She steps up to his side, her face turned toward the sky. It’s cloudy and grey, just like the rest of this camp, of the trenches beyond and the enemy camp beyond that. He wonders if she goes there, too, with her bag of mercy and her lullabies. 

They stay there, silent, until the next wave of wounded floods in and dawn crests over the war to end all wars. 

+

+

**The Sun**

+

When she wakes in the desert, her first thought is that she must have been out longer than she thought. The last thing she remembers is the quickening of the head hunter that challenged her and then…she died. Stab wound in the gut. And came back, because that’s what ‘cellular sunburn’ is, when it’s at home. She’s forgiven Willow a lot of mistakes, but this? She doesn’t think she can. But hey, she has eternity to try, right?

First though, she needs to find out what happened because this is not they alley she died in, or the night sky she bled out under. With a grimace she stands and starts walking in a straight line and random direction. 

+

It’s the arrival of true dark that lets her know that something is very wrong. The stars above her head are too bright and too many, constellations too strange for this to be America. She must be on another continent entirely. 

+

After a week of walking in a straight line she admits defeat. No roads. No city lights on the horizon. Nothing. Only the sand and the sun.

+

She is not sure who spots who first, but she has never felt as happy as she does at the sight of five men running down a sloping dune to meet her. Only there’s something wrong because they don’t slow as they come close and they don’t smile. Their faces are grimaces and the primitive knife slams into her before she has any chance to react.

+

She wakes once more with gritty sand in her mouth, dried blood on her shirt and nothing but the hot wind for company. Climbing back to her feet, she resumes walking. 

+

It happens again. And again. She finds humans, walks up to them and gets killed. No questions. No hesitation. It doesn’t matter if she hides the scythe beforehand, if she covers her blonde hair or crawls to them half dead from thirst. They kill her. 

+

This isn’t a question of where. It’s a question of _when_.

+

Animals kill for food, their young, their territory and their survival. These humans are much the same, except for the fear in their eyes. Anything they don’t know, they fear and what they fear, the hate. What they hate, they kill. 

If this is the beginning of time and these people are the foundation of mankind then she wonders how civilization was ever created because this total rejection of anything new, this ignorance and hate and violence, is deadly. 

+

Over time she comes to think of them not as humans but as homo sapiens. Smart animals. Dangerous animals. 

She doesn’t walk up to them anymore but sneaks in at night, taking what she needs and leaving again before dawn. She doesn’t feel guilt. Not when half this infernal desert bears the dark stains of her blood. Not for creatures that kill their own children because they are different.

But neither does she pity them and so, after a decade or two, she simply survives day after day, not paying any more attention to the humans than to the beetles and birds.

+

She still kills any demon she finds in the hope of keeping this world alive long enough for it to become something worth saving. 

Besides, demons in this time are a lot more civilized than humans and the things she loots from their corpses are worth the effort it takes to hunt them down.

+

Slowly, everything she was, everything she tried to be, falls away, is distilled until only the most basic truths remains. Warrior. Fighter. Survivor. 

And the slayer inside of her revels in it, in the freedom of this world, the world she was born into. Without the smells and sounds of civilization everything is sharper, clearer, simpler. 

The girl that was once Buffy cherishes that simplicity because is many ways, it is a relief. Tree good, she thinks, fire bad, and smiles at the old joke, even though she has forgotten who told it and why. A few more years of this, and she’ll probably forget the joke itself, too. 

+

The first one is a girl, a child almost. She finds her half dead and sun burnt and gives her water and shelter for the night after saving her from a group of slaver demons. After that, the girl trails behind her, refusing to leave. 

On the fifth night, she caves and waves the girl closer to the tiny fire she built from an unfortunate tree she came across the day before. The little one – her name an unpronounceable clacking of the tongue – teaches her the language of her people by telling her stories. 

At one point, she confesses that the reason she was cast from her tribe was that she ‘looks in the dark’. It takes a whole month and a few curious incidents for Buffy to realize that the girl is a seer. Feeling humorous and bitter sweet, she names the girl Dru after another fading wisp of memory and decides to keep her around.

+

Over time, the two of them find more outcasts. Many of them are too far gone to save, mad with thirst or broken enough to welcome death but some of them they can fix. 

Many of them are ‘god touched’, people with the sight or some inherent magic, with demonic blood in their veins. A lot are women accused of being barren, children that brought their people bad luck, men crippled in fights or accidents. In short, anyone that is useless or at least perceived as such by their people.

Buffy and Dru take them all.

And Warrior, Fighter and Survivor are joined by other things. Friend. Leader. Protector. 

(Somewhere, deep down, she remembers this.)

+

Many of those they saved truly are different. Those who are more than simply human also seem more…evolved, somehow. They are smart, flexible. They learn eagerly, their curiosity almost causing her a heart attack more than once.

(There is a good chance, she realizes at some point, that the only reason mankind ever made it out of this damn desert was the demon blood in their veins, pushing evolution ahead. A chance that homo sapiens sapiens owns its existence to the supernatural. 

Ain’t that a kicker.) 

Out of all of her mismatched children, there are four who are special. Immortal like her, they are far from the homo sapiens crawling in the dirt. They understand abstract concepts, they learn, they invent. 

She teaches them to count. In English, because the various tribal dialects they speak have no words for numbers above twenty. Ten fingers, ten toes. That’s the world she lives in, now. They are like her, modern spirits stuck in a time that has nothing to offer to them and it leaves them ravenous and angry.

+

They all take what they need, killing as they would be killed. It is necessary. Darwin spoke about survival of the fittest, but even he had no concept of the cruelty of existing before time.

But her four boys, her knights, her lifeline, don’t just kill for survival. Over the centuries their memories blur and get confused but they never forget the hate they all experienced. They never forget the pain and desolation of being alone in the wild.

(Living forever leaves a lot of time for grudges to settle in.)

They kill because they can, because they have power and others don’t. They kill because once upon a time, they were killed and at the heart of it, they’re all just victims, lashing out. And she lets them. Not because they are her best fighters. Not because her people need what they bring back from their raids. Not because she can’t stop them.

She lets them because she loves them the way a drowning man loves the thing keeping him afloat, the way a suicide loves the knife slitting their wrists. 

They’re feral things and full of hate and violence, but she wears rags made from animal pelts now and kills without prejudice. Her time to judge others has come and gone. They keep her warm at night and they don’t die. For that alone, she loves them. 

Lover and Beloved join the collection and the morals of a world ten thousand years away have no place here. 

+

Her people call her Sun. No language she has come across has a concept of seasons and thus no word for summer. The closet approximation Dru ever came up with was Sun and long after the woman’s death, that is the name she keeps.

She is the Sun.

Only four men know of the strange sequence of sounds that was once her name. The soft plosive _b_ followed by the rounding of lips and the friction of the _f_ , ending in another, drawn out vowel. Buffy. Her name. It’s just sounds now, just syllables, meaning lost to time.

They promise to keep it safe for her anyway. 

+

And so she stands at the edge of their camp one day, Kronos’ arm wrapped tightly around her waist and Silas nuzzling into her long dirty hair with a grin. Caspian watches with mild amusement from the back of his horse, occasionally kicking out at them when they stumble too close to him. 

Then Methos comes galloping over the last dune, wicked grin on his painted face as he jumps off his horse with his sword drawn, chasing off Kronos and Silas and swooping in for a searing kiss that tastes of salt and sand and ozone.

As he pulls back he slings his own arm around her, pulling her close.

“How many?” she asks.

“Ten for every one of us.”

Caspian laughs, eager for a fight and Silas joins him, merrily swinging his weapon of choice. Methos pulls a face at their antics but lets them get away with it. She just sighs.

By dawn they will ride into the tribe camped beyond those dunes and scatter the animals, kill the people, and claim the spoils. They will shed blood and ruin lives and do it all with laughter on their tongues. 

Buffy would have hated this. But Buffy is just sound now. 

+

This is not a question of when. It is a question of _who_.

The answer is: Herself.

+

+

**Holy Man**

+

His stride is sure and quick as he moves through the camp, soldiers moving out of his way with averted eyes. He is their leader, the general, their god. He has brought them to the gates of this city, this filthy, uncivilized Paris all the way from their native lands. In their eyes, there is nothing he cannot do.

He bypasses the command tent for his own personal one, set slightly apart from the others and marked by the banner of the soaring eagle swaying softly in the late night breeze. The preparations for the attack on the city were exhausting, but now that they are done with, he can look over his army, over the campfires reaching far into the dark night, and know that they will win. 

They are – he is – unstoppable. And after this town, the ocean is only weeks away. Gods know, he will bathe in it until his skin peels and he freezes.

Nodding to the guards on either side of the entrance, he steps inside his tent, tying the flaps down for the night. The leather ties will hold no-one off but they are a clear sign that he wants peace and his men know better than to go against his wishes. 

Swinging his cloak off his shoulders and onto a chair, he walks to a small table and pours himself some of the wine waiting for him there. He drinks without hesitation, well beyond such mortal things as fearing poison. With a dagger he spears half an apple and is about to bite into it, when a cool breeze brushes along his spine, both on and under his skin. 

Putting goblet and apple down uncaringly, his hands wander to his sword without conscious thought as he spins slowly to take in the entirety of the tent. There is no-one there. Frowning in annoyance he turns again and…there.

Blonde hair and fair skin are the only things he sees in the semi dark for a long moment before she takes a step into the light. Dainty and frail looking, she still carries herself with the air of a queen. Her dress is dark blue and simple but not of the coarse wool the people in these regions wear but the soft, fine cotton of his native Rome. Unbidden, a smile twitches on his lips. Her face is pretty enough, he decides, big green eyes focused on him, mouth set in a neutral but lush line. 

If she is one of the whores accompanying the army, she has hidden well from him until now. But…no. This woman is no whore. 

“My name is Darius,” he introduces himself, in Latin, just to see what happens, before drawing his sword.

She inclines her head minutely, a smile crossing her delicate features. 

“Call me Summer,” she responds in kind but does not draw a weapon. In fact, he wonders where she would hide one. Her skirts fold close to her body, her cloak is open, hiding nothing. There is no weight of a weapon, pulling anything askew.

“How may I serve you, my Lady?” His tone mocking, his eyes amused. Does she plan to talk his head off his shoulders?

“Tell me why you are here?”

With an exaggerated sigh he lowers his sword, places it on the table and then falls bonelessly into the chair next to it, waving a negligent hand for her to join him. All she does is take another step closer to the center of the tent, leaning against a post, hands folded in front of her stomach. Such manners. But then, the hilt of his weapon is still right by his hand and she did not get into the very heart of his army by being careless and rash.

He reclaims his discarded dinner. 

“Well,” he offers between bites, “This _is_ my tent.”

She raises one eyebrow at him but doesn’t comment on his teasing. “You are far from home,” she informs him instead.

He nods and spears some cheese with his dagger. “I am aware of that.”

The roll of her eyes is so fast he almost doesn’t catch it but he does and oh, this one might be interesting. She is certainly old enough to have more to offer than this dreadful century. Really, he has been bored. 

“I’ll be blunt then.”

He waves a hand for her to go ahead, almost dislodging the cheese. 

“What in Hades’ name do you think you’re doing?”

The cheese drops forgotten back onto the silver tray as he crosses his legs at the ankles and leans farther back, inquiring, “I beg your pardon, my Lady?”

She does not move except to narrow her eyes and primly announce. “We are immortal. The affairs of mortals are not our concern. And yet here you are, leading an army across two continents, bringing death and destruction with you wherever you go.”

He shrugs. “I was bored.”

A part of him, he admits, is hoping to draw her out and make her mad. She seems the type to protect the poor mortals from evil like himself. There is supposed to be a holy man inside Paris, one of their kind, too. It is part of the reason he wants the city. Self righteous people do so amuse him. 

But, to his disappointment, she refuses to be baited so easily. Instead she laughs, her posture abruptly changing, hands dropping, shoulders relaxing. That, more than anything she’s done so far, makes him wary of her. 

“Bored,” she demands, a new sparkly in her gaze, “After barely half a millennium? My dear general, I do hope you find a quick end because if you are that easy to bore, forever seems to be the wrong place for you.”

It’s his turn to laugh at that as he finally takes his hand off his sword and offers, “Then you will just have to amuse me.”

Arms crossing in front of her in fake indignation she asks, “Why would I?”

“Why are you here?”

Shrugging, she lets her arms drop again. “I was curious about the immortal taking over the world. Although,” she decides, her tiny nose wrinkling, “You seems a bit too arrogant for my tastes.”

“Why,” he refills his goblet with wine and hands it to her with a flourish before continuing, “You shouldn’t believe first impressions, my Lady.”

With a wry nod she accepts the drink and seat he offers. Smirking, Darius slouches in his seat, all thoughts of battle forgotten for the moment. If she is willing to alleviate the boredom that made him start this campaign to the ocean, then he might just be willing to satisfy her curiosity.

Lifting the jug of wine in a toast, he says, “I think this may be the beginning of a beautiful friendship, Lady Summer.”

She laughs.

+

\+ 

**Death**

+

Dru’s eyes turn don’t turn white as Cordelia’s did – will do, one day – but they turn glassy whenever the sight takes her over and so Buffy holds very still as soon as she notices the other woman’s expression and lets her lean into her. 

After a few agonizingly slow moments, Dru returns to her body with a slight shudder and a drawn out sigh. Unerringly, her left arm lifts to point south as she says, “Blue lightning. Forever. A fight. That way. The black eyes are your gift.”

After that she closes her eyes and refuses to say anymore. She is tired and getting old slowly, but still too fast for Sun who still looks like she did twenty, fifty years ago. It’s not fair but it’s life and this is how it goes, so, with all the care in the world, the slayer hands the seer over to her chosen mate and takes off toward the south. She has some water, her scythe and immortality with her. She needs nothing else. Not anymore.

+

She walks half a day without rest before she hears it. One might think that sound carries far in the plains of the desert but they don’t. Wind whips them away and the soft sands swallow them and so, she’s barely dune away when she hears the dull sounds of weapons clashing. Stone and bone, most likely. Fire-hardened wood, if there is nothing harder at hand.

One quickening races down her spine followed directly by another as they come into sight. Two men, both with stone axes, both dirty and bloody and panting hard, fighting for the right to take everything from the other. 

One of them is a mountain of a man, black bearded and scarred in patterns that mean nothing to her, the other is lighter, faster, with features that – even through the grime – seem cut from stone. Clear lines and an amused expression even as he escapes having his skull caved in by a split second. His eyes are black and neither man pauses to acknowledge her presence. 

So she just stands there, waiting, watching as the smaller man gets disarmed, his arm breaking with a jarring sound. His weapon arches in the air, the glimmer in the stone catching the sun for a moment, before crashing back down, close to her feet.

Clutching his injured arm, he drops to his knees and more stone catches the light as an axe is drawn back for a strike that will rip his head from his neck.

She has known for a long time that Dru’s visions are not sent by the Powers or any other deity. She doesn’t know their purpose. Are they meant to warn or just to show? To help prevent or guide the path? Or are they just accidents, the future leaking through, as pointless as everything else in these parts?

But they said that black eyes is supposed to be hers, and she wants. She wants. 

(This place has infected her long ago, the violence and greed and hunger of it. There is no point in it anymore.)

So she grabs the axe and throws it, head over hilt, spinning toward the loser. 

In a breathtaking move he throws himself forward, under the falling stroke of his opponent, reaches out, grasps the hilt of his weapon and drives it into the other man’s knees.

A moment later, lightning gathers above-head and the fight is over in a flash of blue and blood, spinal column severed by a powerful hit. 

Head thrown back, arms spread, she lets the quickening whip around her and into the winner, enjoying the feel of power and electricity that wraps her up for just a few seconds. It’s about power, she knows that now. 

Then, still feeling light, she slides down the dune to kneel beside the winner. He looks up at her, eyes wide with exhaustion and surprise, face weary. He holds his weapon tightly. 

“I will not harm you,” she placates, hands in plain sight, far from the handle of the scythe behind her shoulder. This world doesn’t mine metal yet, doesn’t know to use it, but they always understand what the scythe is just fine. 

“Why?” Neutral, flat and careful. Up close his eyes are not the piercing black she noticed before but the deepest blue she has ever seen and they glitter like dark stars. Beautiful, beautiful creature.

“You’re mine,” She tells him.

He looks at her forever, not judging, mot measuring, just looking. Then he nods and allows her to set his arm. 

+

Years later he fights by her side, matching her step for step, never faltering, never dying like everyone else. She found him because Dru showed her the way but she keeps him because he reminds her of nothing and demands only what she is willing to give. 

There is love there, she is sure, but he is no Angel or Spike, not even a Riley, though those memories seem dim at the best of times now. He is simply himself and when she crawls into his tent at night, she belongs. He is her gift and her gift is death and belonging to him feels like home. 

That is all there is to it. 

+

+

**War**

+

He is a priest, easily recognized by his colourful garb and the expensive trinkets woven into his hair, beads from the coast, ebony from the jungles farther south. As they attack he simply stands in the middle of the village, staff in hand, so sure of his immunity. 

He is a holy man. He does not know that where they come from, holy men die just like regular men. He does not know that they are not the usual pirates or bandits one expects here on this slim strip of fertile land, but the savage beasts from the desert lands. His gods’ wrath, a wrath that seems all encompassing to him, means nothing to them, who are gods unto themselves. Heathen gods for a heathen people collected from outcasts and scraps of humanity she has brought together out of loneliness. He does not know that the force of his life trickles down her back like ice water, sweet and chilling. 

One of them, soon. But not yet. For now he stands, proud and foolish, arrogant and chilling for it. He is beautiful certainly, in his conviction, the absolute belief in his superiority. His face, a motley assortment of features only found along certain coast lines, where local tribes mingle with those beyond the sea, is alight with fervent belief.

There is a moment, a single second when his eyes widen impossibly and all that pretty superiority is washed away in a flood of fear before Methos whirls past him like a devil, eddies of dust spinning around him, weapon swinging over his head and coming downdowndown in a killing stroke. As the priest’s body drops to the ground, lifeblood already soaking the ground, Sun gives her lover a sharp look. He throws back a cheeky smirk as he turns around and back to the killed priest. 

He cuts down two more villagers and then goes on to loot their corpses. Once he is finished he grabs the priest and tosses him onto his shoulders like a sack of meat and bones. Then, in a rush of adrenaline, he rushes her, kissing her hotly and passionately with the taste of blood not his own on his lips.

She tries to glare and fails, pushing him away from her with a laugh and watching as he hefts his weapon again, the body over his shoulders mercilessly abused as a shield as she returns to the fight.

+

They watch with mild curiosity as he first twitches and then comes back to life with a painful gasp and cough. It’s different for everyone. He looks around, confused, and his eyes widen yet again as he spies the man that killed him. Awkwardly and on weak limbs he tries to scramble backwards only to be stopped by the length of rope looped around his ankles and attached to a heavy rock. 

“What have you done to me?” he finally demands eyes fixed, curiously, on Sun, not of Methos. 

She shrugs, drawing a stone dagger from a sheath on her thigh. She was always better at showing than at telling. “You cannot die,” she says, “And neither can we.”

Then she draws the tip of her weapon down the length of her forearm and watches as blood wells up violently and then just stops as the gaping wound closes with a crackle of blue sparks. 

For long moments, the priest only stares. First at her arm, then at the bloody dagger. Her face is next, then Methos’ and then he fumbles a hand into his robes to check for the wound that should be there and finds only smooth skin.

He throws his head back, spreads his arms, arrogance back in his expression, coupled with something more sinister this time, and he laughs. He laughs and laughs and laughs as something snaps inside of him, something that must have been fragile all along.

“A god,” he howls in between peals of laughter, “I am a god!”

Buffy sighs in dismay. She didn’t mean for him to break, didn’t mean to snap that fragile part of his soul that makes him human. She never does, but this world, this desert, makes people brittle and so, so easy to break. They crack under the gentlest pressure of her hands, falling to sand, running through her fingers until there is nothing left but dust. 

Sometimes she hates this place. 

(Her Death, her Black Eyes came to her already broken and she is grateful for that, when she takes the time to think about it.)

Methos chuckles, bemused by the priest’s antics and more willing to accept another broken toy. He doesn’t know what people are like when they are whole. He, too, has spent all his lives here. He knows nothing else. 

Not yet.

+

After that first night, Kronos confuses men and gods, confuses himself with a deity and sometimes confuses mortals with beasts. His world is fragile and sharp, dangerous and bright, just like he is, because there is something inside of him that thrives on power and dominance and immortality is a weapon in his smooth hands. 

But they made him and they love him, in their own ways so they will not turn him away. They will not set him loose in a world that has no way to defend itself against him. So they keep him. 

Methos is her gift and her gift is Death but Kronos, crazy, wild, beautiful, joyful, dangerous, manic Kronos, is War. 

+

+

**Famine**

+

Methos is of the desert, Kronos is of the coast and she is of nowhere at all. Her place is with her people but they keep dying and the sand; she’s fed up with the sand. Dru loved it dearly but Dru is gone, has been for years and so, one day, she picks a direction at random and orders the camp packed up. And they walk.

+

Where green shyly pokes its head out of the still yellow ground, they find him. A beast speaker he is half animal himself, a mountain of a man. Head shaved bald, beard long and tangled, he groans and grunts, howls and growls. The tribe tolerate him because he takes care of their beasts and protects them.

Maybe it is his presence, the presence of someone half man half animal, who does not age and does not die, that makes them more tolerant than their contemporaries. Maybe it is just the climate, less cruel, less harsh. They leave her and her people to set up their tents close to the settlement. Later that night, the three of them go to visit the beast speaker.

+

Kronos grabs her around the waist with a cackle, pulling her from her sitting position and trying to fling her over his shoulder. She smacks him on the arm and pulls away, leaning into Methos. Sometimes, War is a spoiled child. Their child. They made him, after all. He pouts at them, a frown pulling at his brows before he wriggles between them, an arm slung around their shoulders, grinning. 

“Don’t be like that, brother,” he tells Methos. “Share the Sun with me.”

Death grunts and shoves him off, but doesn’t complain as he takes her free hand in his and drags them off to see the animal man. 

+

He lives in a dirty little hut outside the village circle, a few sticks and flaps of hide, as quickly torn down and put up. The place is empty except for a bedroll and a big axe propped against the wall next to the flap serving as a door. There is barely enough room for four to stand so they don’t, sitting outside in the nightly chill instead.

He stares at the three of them, Buffy especially. He’s never seen blonde hair like his own, never felt any quickening but his own. They must seem to him as Kronos would like to seem to all men, gods. But despite his awe, he remains quiet, talking little in a gruff and unused voice, rubbing the head of the jackal he tamed instead. 

Sun watches him back, his broad, Caucasian features, his short, bleached hair. Kronos is a motely of races, skin paler than most, and Methos’ face is shaped all wrong for this continent despite his deep tan, his edges too sharp, his face too angular, but Silas looks like someone from… from home. She wonders how far he walked, how far he came. If he came the same way Methos did. If he’ll refuse to talk of it the way Methos does. 

Eventually, shyly, he asks if they know any songs. Methos laughs and Kronos feigns boredom but both prod her until she gives in and hums quietly into the dark.

And Methos stops laughing and closes his eyes as Kronos leans against him and Silas stops the repetitive scratching between the jackal’s ears to listen, head cocked to one side. Not because she is good at what she does but because it is a song a long blurred sister once loved and she remembers it now with her heart and not her head. It is a song of who she used to be, this girl that seems so strange and foreign to her today. 

It’s all she has ever told of her past.

+

The next morning Kronos curses as he struggles to rekindle the fire with fingers stiff from the cold and when they are all awake and Silas wanders into the settlement to gather the food the tribe spare for him, War stretches and says, “I want to keep him.”

She raises an eyebrow at him. 

“As a pet,” he clarifies, “Doesn’t seem very bright, but that axe of his needs some skill.”

Methos rolls his eyes as he always does and Sun smacks him over the head with the dull end of her weapon. Hard. It reminds Kronos. Reminds him of the fact that despite his immortality he can still die, that he is still mortal in his own way and not a god. It reminds him that he belongs to the Sun. She does not like slaves and human pets. 

+

They come close under the guise traders and by the time they realize their mistake, the bandits are already breaking like water over the shore, slashing the settlement to pieces. 

By the time the three reach the settlement that morning, all that is left to do is kill the killers, slaughter the slaughterers and grant a more merciful fate to the rapists. Only Silas is still there, big and bald and grim, wielding his axe like an extension of himself, a limb of death. Bodies pile up around him as he screams his fury, rages and rages. 

They do not know where he came from, do not know who he once was or why he loves his beasts so much but they know that at his core, he is a simple creature. And here, he found acceptance. He found people to claim as his. And now they are gone. He rages. He dies. He gets back up. He rages. It’s past dusk when he drops to his knees for the final time, gut wrenching roar breaking from his throat, racing down their spines, touching the primal parts of what they are. 

+

The desert makes things brittle, makes them easy to break. But here, at the edge of a greener world, they still die. Everyone always dies. Except for her and Methos and Kronos and now, here, Silas. 

There is no talk, no real decision. They pack their tents and possessions and leave the same day, before the vultures come. They do not bury the dead, neither their own, nor Silas’. 

Silas follows in their wake, silent and dirty, bloodstained and glassy-eyed. 

+

Methos is her gift and her gift is Death and wild and crazy Kronos is War but Silas is Famine, sucking the life out of a world that killed all he knew. 

He sleeps with his axe now, not his beasts. 

+

+

**Pestilence**

+

He comes in the dead of night, a shadow among shadows, his face smeared with soot and dirt to hide. He is, to the mortals within the boundaries of the camp, an invisible monster of death.

To the four of them, he is perfectly visible and killable because he has come to take their heads and his intention trickles down their backs along with his quickening and Buffy tastes ozone and blood as she grabs her scythe and exits the tent, Methos right behind her.

A single word from her has all mortals scrambling to get into their tents and huts, leaving the circle around the campfire dusty and empty for their fight. If there were anything akin to honor in this time and place, they would fight one on one but there is not and so she watches with a grim smirk as Silas uses the dull end of his axe to beat the intruder down brutally. Methos takes a running step, kicking him in the stomach before he picks up the intruder’s weapon and flings it into the dark beyond the firelight. 

Kronos laughs long and loud and he grabs the immortal by the hair and drags him to a post a few feet from the fire. He wrenches the man’s arms behind his back and ties him to the post with strips of cloth and rope. Then he pats the man on his almost bald head and tries to sneak a kiss from Sun.

She pulls back after a moment, scowling at him out of habit. She suspects, sometimes, that immortality is synonymous to insanity and they all have more than a few loose screws. That is what happens, she muses, when you take a human being and strip away all it ever knew. 

+

But Caspian, brutal, hard, fast, killer Caspian is madder than all of them, even Kronos. But they know what made Kronos the way he is and they have no idea at all where the mad glint on Caspian’s eyes comes from. They cannot see the horrors inside his head, nor do they care to. They have their own demons.

She does, too. Hers are just more quiet. 

They keep Caspian tied to the post for days. In the mornings, he screams abuse at them. By noon, he falls silent and around sunset, his blistered, red head lolls uselessly as his eyes turn up in his head and he faints. During the nights, he sleeps, mostly. Every day, one or twice, he dies. Kronos and Silas bet on the exact time. 

She tries to avoid their bets and his deaths, but does nothing against them. He tried to hurt what is hers. In the mornings though, she sometimes sits with him and listens to him speak. There is a brain behind the blinding madness, a man behind the roaring laughter. Occasionally, she gives him water. Silas gets mad then because it makes him lose his bet.

+

They let him go, eventually because they are moving on and lugging an immortal prisoner around with them isn’t worth the effort. And leaving him there would be cruel and they are not that. Most of the time. 

He tried to kill them after all. But then, who hasn’t? Life is cheap.

She unties him and points him in the direction of his weapon before grabbing her pack and turning to follow the others. They walk through the day and set up camp around sunset close to an oasis. He arrives an hour later, his crude stone blade across his shoulders, skin sunburnt and expression amused. 

Methos raises an eyebrow at him and then, after a few moments of quiet staring, offers him some fruit and bread. 

+

He never tells them why he sticks around and they never ask. His reasons are his own and he knows how to calm the beast in Silas, knows how to play Kronos’ games and he makes a good watchdog and a better warrior. 

So he stays and Sun has her four knights.

Methos is her gift and her gift is Death and wild and crazy Kronos is War. Silas is Famine, sucking the life out of a world that killed all he knew and Caspian is the obscenely grinning Pestilence, bringing a blanket of death with him wherever they go.

+

+

**Requiem**

+

This is how things went:

+

First Methos comes, cocky smile on his lips and something softer in his eyes and he takes her by the hand and leads her away from the fire. Sometimes, when he feels edgy, he will throw her over his shoulder and she will call him caveman. He will give her a confused looked and then let it go, attributing it to the horrible and magical place she comes from.

He insists that is must be a horrible place because even centuries later, she still cries and sometimes her eyes grow hollow with memory that refuses to fade. He hates the place she was born in, simply for what it did to her. They all do. 

But most nights, that doesn’t matter. He leads, or carries, her away from the fire and into their tent where he strips her and loves her and claws at her and makes her laugh and reminds her of life in a world that is dead and dying all around them. Often, they simply talk. Whatever they do, it does not matter because inside their hide-and-wood walls, they are alone and only themselves. They can do whatever pleases them. Here, they are no warriors. Here, they have no past, no blood on their hands. 

Eventually, inevitably, they will crawl into bed and he will spoon up behind her, breathing into her neck, reminding her…reminding her. 

+

Kronos comes when the songs and stories by the camp fire fade into the night. He comes with the cocky swagger and self-assuredness of one who wants to be jealous but is afraid to. He wants her for himself - sometimes - but he knows that it would cost him everything. So he takes some freedoms and doesn’t even think of others and when Death smacks him down like a naughty puppy, he fights back only as much as is expected of him. 

He strips, losing clothes and weapons in a trail that leads from the tent flap to their bedstead and he slips in next to her. Occasionally, he will kiss her. Occasionally, Death will take offence because he is obsessive and possessive and War will kiss him too, laughter on his lips and madness in the glint of his eyes. 

Sometimes, rarely, they will fuck like animals, all three of them, with their teeth sharp and their eyes wide open.

They will curl up and they will sleep.

For a while. 

+

Silas comes next, most of the time. Sometimes he is last, but not often. He comes after he has put all the animals to rest, fed and watered and soothed them. He comes smelling of earth and dirt and living things and he takes his place at the foot of the bed with a tired grunt. 

She shoves Methos’ arm off her waist and pushes Kronos away to sit up and crawl down to gently, lovingly, kiss Famine on the forehead. Of all four of her beautiful mad boys, he is the one that is most like a son to her, the one that is most like a child. He does not scheme or hate. His emotions are raw and true and he loves honestly. There is no deceit in him, for all his rage. 

So she kisses him on the forehead and not on the mouth and for a while, he will tell her of the dogs and goats and whatever other animals they happen to drag around with them at the moment. Eventually, he smacks his lips and that is her signal to retreat. He is tired. She will let him sleep.

+

Caspian is last, always the night owl, always outside, watching, waiting. It is his way of protecting them. He likes being their sentry. He likes knowing that they sleep, trusting in him to keep them safe where once he would have slit their bellies and taken their heads.

He spends most of his nights haunting the camp and its edges, coming, going, never really there. He is a ghost in the dark, dangerous and deadly. He comes to bed only when someone else wakes to take his place. 

And then he slips into the tent, stripping much like Kronos before him, mixing up their clothes and weapons, and slides into the last free space beside Silas, half on top of Kronos. 

When he wakes the others, they grunt and when he strokes a strangely gentle finger down Sun’s face, she grumbles quietly. He smiles when he manages to elicit that sound from her. He doesn’t care for women, never has, fucks Kronos when he feels like it, Methos when their queens lets him, but never her. Her shape does nothing for him and his nothing for her, so she bats at his hand and grumbles into Methos’ chest and he lets her be. 

They sleep.

+

There are some unspoken rules the all abide to in their strangely full bed. Kronos will never try to do more than he is allowed. No-one will ever crowd Methos.. They will never let her sleep on the outside of their little pile. Silas and Caspian always stay just a bit farther away than they have to. 

In the morning though, they always wake up in a mess of tangled limbs and hair, blinking blearily and feeling warmer than the sun will ever make them.

+

And this is how they go:

+

She crawls into bed in the early hours of morning, exhausted, tired to the bone and alone. She feels cold and pulls the blankets close and eventually, she falls asleep. 

She wakes, reaching around her for Methos’ warmth, for Kronos arms. She breathes in deeply, hoping to catch a whiff of earth and dirt and gropes blindly for a madly cackling Caspian. And then reality returns and she is alone again because they are all gone.

Methos. It’s his fault. _His fault_. She tries the words on her tongue every day but she can’t make them fit. It’s not really his fault. She has known this day would come since he was given to her in a storm of lightning and ozone so, so long ago. 

Nothing lasts forever. 

Not even them. 

She made a decision, a long time ago, lifetimes before anything she remembers now. She decided to put her conscience and her guilt into a box and bury it in the desert. She decided to live as she chose and not bend anymore. She decided to become what she is, what she was. She was Sun because she wanted to be, because she decided to put away Buffy, to let it become a sound without meaning, a past.

Her boys never made that decision. 

They grew up in a place where such things as guilt and regret didn’t exist and they never knew they missed them. But eventually, like the forbidden fruit, those feelings were there, close enough to taste, seductive and strong and Methos, always too curious, took a bite. 

He learned moral and honesty and guilt. Most of all guilt.

He learned it and he looked upon them and their lives and he felt sick. He looked at her and his eyes were hollow. 

And he walked away.

That was what hurt the most. Not that he went but that he didn’t ask her to come with him. Like he doubted she would. It is hard to imagine that even after millennia he still doesn’t know that she loves them all equally but him far beyond that. She would die for any of her collected family. She lives only for him. 

Since a time before swords, before horses, before villages and agriculture. A time before numbers and maths and navigation. A time before time and the only one who was there with her through all of that, is him. There’s nothing she wouldn’t do for him and somehow, someway, the idiot missed that. 

So he walked away and after that she couldn’t stay. She left too, made four horsemen and their queen into three bandits with nothing to hold them together and just rode away. 

+

Now she wakes at night and her bed is cold and empty and all she has left are memories of how things were and the vague expectation of the day she finds her Death again. 

He’s her gift. She won’t let him go. 

But she is so cold.

+

+

**Weapon**

+

Step, lunge, parry, turn, jump, duck, parry, strike, duck, parry, parry, feint low and swipe high, stab, lunge, parry, duck. 

It’s a song as familiar as her own name, maybe more so. Her name changes with the seasons, never the same, never steady. There is only one person who remembers her true name now and even he rarely uses it. He still calls her Sun. 

But this, this always stays the same. A weapon, a sword, a blade never changes. It never demands new things. It never becomes more or less than it is. A blade is death and the moves are ingrained so deeply in her body that she doesn’t need to think. She just _does_. Her arms, her feet and wrists, they all know this dance. 

She remembers a man’s voice in her sleep sometimes, telling her to parry quicker, swipe higher, to watch her reach. She remembers the voice telling her to make the weapon a part of her. 

She remembers that the voice’s name was, is – will be – Giles and at seventeen she had no idea what he was walking about. 

Now, more than a thousand years before he is born, she knows. Leaving home without a weapon feels unnatural. Leaving _bed_ without at least a knife on her person is not something she has done in a long time. 

When she was a girl, mortal still, the Council wanted her to be a weapon. They wanted her to be a blade for their war, their justice. She refused. She struggled. She wanted to be a girl. 

For so long, that was all she wanted and then she was free of them, free at the beginning of the world and what she became was…this. 

Even now as she fights for her life she doesn’t spare a thought for her moves, her next attack. She simply does. 

She once believed that she could escape. That she could be anything, anyone. Anything but a weapon.

She attacks one last time, disarming her opponent, striking low and bringing him to his knees. Then she spins once and his head falls. Another victory. Another quickening. Another day she lived because of the sword in her hands.

Eventually, the weapon becomes you. She knows that now. Understands that no matter how long it takes, survival always takes its toll. She doesn’t mind anymore. She can call herself a weapon now without bitterness in her voice. 

It’s, easy really, to be like this. 

Because eventually the weapon becomes you and when it does, that part of yourself that wants to curl up and cry just fades away. 

It makes things a lot simpler. 

+

+

**Spirit of Horrors Past**

+

Death.

Death on a Horse.

Death. On. A Horse.

The words ring in Duncan’s ears, make it hard to focus. He has Methos pressed against the car and he’s talking, talking, talking, spitting acid but the words don’t register. Death. Death on a Horse. 

It’s not a phrase, not a sentence. It’s a title. It’s the name of a nightmare. He saw the horror in Cassandra’s eyes when she remembered. He saw. But he didn’t believe that Methos was the one. That he was the one she hated even more than Kronos. 

He didn’t. He didn’t believe until now, here, Methos pressed against the car, silent, finally. Now he has no choice but to believe. The gentle, shrewd man he calls friend – has called friend – is a monster. The monster that comes and eats children at night. He’s the nightmare. 

He’s…

“Does Summer know?”

There is a moment of complete silence between them and then Duncan shakes the other man, slams him back against the car. Physically he’s so much stronger. He could break the other man like a twig. But it’s not Methos who’s breaking now, is it?

I called you friend, he wants to say. Wants to scream. Instead he repeats, “Does she know?”

And Methos – Death, Death on a god damned fucking horse – throws his head back and he laughs. It’s an ugly sound, half roar and half sob, ugly and bald and cruel. Most of all, though, it’s angry.

“Know?” he repeats. “Know?” He raises his arms suddenly, between Duncan’s elbows and pushes apart, pushes and twists, breaking the younger man’s hold. “We were the horsemen, MacLeod, and she was our bloody queen. Who do you think collected us?”

That’s when the world, already tilting badly, crashes and tumbles and everything breaks apart. 

+

He isn’t fighting with Joe. He’s not. He’s trying to be reasonable. But the man needs to see, needs to understand that this is different. They’ve all killed. It’s the creed they live by. But not like this. Killing is not supposed to bring joy. It is not supposed to be sport, for fun. 

And people you’ve called your friends for over a century are not supposed to be the bad guys. All these years, she preached to him about forgiveness, about thinking before acting. About enjoying life. He never knew that for her, joy lays in killing, in taking life. 

He never expected her to not only condone but take part in these…horrors. He never expected her to love a man that is a monster in human skin. 

He never…

A quickening down his spine like cold water and then the elevator gate screeches open. His sword is in his hands before he knows it, aimed right at her, ready to take her head if she so much as moves. 

She raises a delicate pale gold eyebrow and demands, “Expecting someone?”

The blade never wavers, “Yes. Your husband.”

Whether it’s his tone of voice or the sword against her neck – a neck he kissed and nuzzled and spent hours upon hours looking at when she slept next to him – her expression turns serious. “I’m out of town for a week and you have a fight. What happened this time?”

His expression is hard as stone. A few feet away, Joe shifts and moves out of the immediate danger zone. Duncan lightly rests his blade on her shoulder. A warning. 

“Cassandra came by.”

Her eyes widen a fraction in surprise but her mouth turns into a grim line and then she closes those green eyes and sighs almost inaudibly. Tiredly. But not guiltily. Not full of regret. 

“You know.” It’s not a question. 

“What gave you the idea?”

“Mac…” That’s Joe, trying to play peace maker but Duncan won’t let him. Not this time. Not over this. She owes him the truth at the very least. 

“Yes,” He snaps over his watcher’s protests, “I know. I know that Methos is Death and that Kronos is War. Did you know he’s in town, by the way? I know that you were there and what they did to Cassandra and I know that you lied to me.”

She snorts. “Lied? I never lied to you, Duncan. I didn’t tell you. Just as I’m sure there are things you didn’t tell me.”

“Yeah, but I never killed for pleasure.”

“Oh,” she says and there’s something in her voice now, something sharp. She takes a step forward, allowing the blade to nick her skin, blood trickling down her neck. “And that changes everything, doesn’t it? You’re righteous and good and pure, aren’t you? Newsflash lover,” It’s ugly suddenly, that word when it never was before, “The people you killed? They’re still dead.”

He removes the sword since it’s obviously not going to stop her advancing. Instead he yells right in her face, “I had a reason to kill them!”

If a perfect world, she would now retreat, would fall apart like a house of cards and confess her sins. She would plead for forgiveness. And Duncan would give it because three thousand years ago, the world was a different place and her loves Buffy. He loves her husband, too. 

But this is not a perfect world and she does not back down. It’s obvious she feels no guilt. Instead she spreads her arms wide in the face of his anger, his righteous rage, unarmed and unafraid.

“So had we,” she tells him, voice even, just loud enough for Joe to hear in the far corner where he stands forgotten. 

“We killed them for their food, their clothes, their weapons. We killed them for their water, their tents, their animals, for the pre-immortals living among them. We collected them like stamps, you know. Kronos was one of them. He was a priest. Methos gave him his first death and we took him home and he belonged to us.”

He takes an involuntary half step back in the face of her calm recollection. Then he catches himself. “And I assume you had reasons to rape, capture and torture, too?”

She shakes her head, arms falling to her side. But her voice does not lose its edge. She will not be cowed by his righteous rage. “I never condoned these things. I never condoned what they did to Cassandra.”

Duncan has no idea what to say. So Joe does it for him. “But you didn’t stop it either.”

“No,” she admits, head held high, eyes hollow, “I didn’t.”

“Why?” The sword falls to the ground, unnoticed. There’s no point to it because he knows that can’t beat her. Not now, not ever. 

The smile that flits across her features is ugly and tired. 

“Why not?”

“Because it’s _wrong_! It’s evil! It’s despicable. It’s-“

“Alright,” hands raised not in defence but to placate him. His rage. His betrayed feelings. “Alright. You want to know why? Because I was alone. There was nothing but the sun and the dirt and the dying, so much dying. There was no mercy, no relief, no escape. Anything weak, anything different had to die. I was different, Mac. Every time I tried to get close to another human being, they killed me. They hurt me. They chased me away and left me to die of thirst and hunger and cold, over and over and over again. I died every single day. There were… eternities where the only time another living thing touched me was to hurt me. And I-“

She gasps for air, visibly tries to collect herself. Breathes. 

“I was tired. So fucking tired. Do you know how long a century is when you spend it dying? How it is to be a god among insects? They had no weapons, no tools, some of them barely had language and they despised me, they hated and feared me and they killed me every single time. So I stayed away from them. I don’t know how long I was alone, Mac. Even the few who didn’t cry to kill me always died. It might have been centuries and I…And then I found Methos and he was _mine_. He belonged to me and me alone and he didn’t die like everything else. He didn’t leave. He wasn’t weak and pathetic and he didn’t cower in the dark. He was strong. And so was Kronos, and Silas and Caspian. They were all mine, Mac. They belonged to me. Me! They made it so I wasn’t alone anymore, alright? I would have let them set the world on fire if that’s what it took to keep them with me. I would have killed anyone, let them murder every living being on this planet, just to make them _stay_.”

And then her voice drops to a whisper and her smile turn bitter and lost, “You know what? They left anyway. Well, Methos did. He…he felt guilty. Over Cassandra. Over everything. He left me. He left me alone and it was just like before. It was -”

Joe is there suddenly and he tries to hug her. She shakes her head, evades his arms. “No,” she refuses, “No.”

She looks Duncan straight in the eye and visibly straightens. “I don’t feel guilty, Duncan. I never will. And if I could change it I probably wouldn’t. Not if it meant losing Methos. Hell, not even if it meant losing the others. The world was insane. It was…you can’t imagine what it was like. Those four were all I had. They were my entire world. No apologies, no regrets. That’s how it goes. And now I have to find my wayward husband before he and Kronos try to kill each other permanently. Or before Kronos comes up with some insane scheme to bring terror to the masses. Whichever happens first.”

Her smile is as weak as her attempt at a joke and then she’s gone. 

For the longest time, Duncan just stands there. The rage is gone and what’s left behind is a bad taste in his mouth and a hollow in his chest. 

Joe doesn’t say a word.

\+ 

+

**Confession**

+

The church is quiet. But then it usually is these days. Faith in invisible things has no more room in the hearts and heads of mortals. If they can’t touch it, they do not care for it. It is a sad truth, but truth nonetheless. Darius accepts it and spends the additional free time reading books not nearly as old as him. It is comfortable, if not exciting.

Still, for an hour every day he sits in the confessional, waiting for burdened souls seeking relief. Sometimes, one of them finds their way into his little refuge. Most times he sits alone. 

Today the lost soul comes in the form of an immortal, their quickening rushing along his spine like snow and fire. He will never admit it out loud but sometimes he misses the rush of the Game. The heady smell of ozone and your own sweat, of knowing that it is your muscles and skill that keeps you alive. It is not more satisfying than this way of fighting he has chosen for himself, but a different _kind_ of satisfying.

The wood creaks softly as someone slips into the other half of the confessional and he waits silently until they speak.

“Forgive me father,” they start and the voice is achingly familiar, “For I have sinned. Since my last confession it’s been…well, if there ever was one, I’ve forgotten when. It happens I guess.”

There is a desperate sort of amusement in that voice and he asks very carefully, “Summer?”

Sometimes she asks why he still calls her that when she has had a hundred different names since they met. And this name is no more real than any other she ever wore around her like a cloak. Cover, nothing more. But he looks at her, at the gold of her hair and the fire of her skin, the light in her reflecting green eyes and Summer is what he sees. Heat and grass and blinding desert sunlight. 

He has never asked if she has ever been to the desert, afraid of her answer. Some things just stay with them, no matter how much time passes and there is a stain of sand and blood about her that makes him sad at times. Because it implies things that do not bear thinking about in the dead of the night.

“Yeah, it’s me.”

There is a sense of surprise in him that doesn’t reflect in his voice. He is good at what he does. Still the question is obvious. “What are you doing here?”

“Uhm, confessing?” Unsure. She sounds unsure. He’s never heard her unsure before. She is the kind of immortal that treads the world like they know every single inch of it, every rock, tree and building. Steady as the bedrock of the oceans. 

“You don’t believe in God, Summer.”

A stretch of silence. Then, “You’re right. I should go.”

“I didn’t say that. I just wonder. You have never felt the urge to confess before and I’ve been a priest for a thousand years.” 

“I was there,” she reminds him. “I just feel like it, I guess.” Something wrong with her voice. Unsure, yes, and small. In anyone else he’d call it fragility. 

“Really?”

A sigh. “No.”

“Then what is it?”

Silence. “Today… today a bouncing baby girl was born in Los Angeles, California.”

“I don’t understand.”

She laughs and it sounds bitter. “I don’t either. Not anymore. Things used to be easy, you know? But I guess this really was a stupid idea.”

Too much. There is too much in her words. So he picks at the smallest bits first, trying to find the string that will unravel the whole. “Why?”

“You know,” she suddenly demands, chipper as a sunny day, “I hate it when you go all insightful on me. It’s annoying.”

He can’t quite keep the smile out of his voice, “Yes, I do.”

An amused groan and then, “You still don’t deserve to have all my sins in your head.”

Distraction. He doesn’t allow it. “That’s what I’m here for.”

He can hear the soft rustle of fabric as she shakes her head. “Not this, old friend, not this.”

He refuses to back down. “If you can tell it, I can hear it.”

She huffs and he just knows that she is running one hand through her hair, frowning. “You can’t know that.”

“You are here. You want to talk. I will listen, Summer.” There, that should end this dance. 

“I don’t want to talk.”

This time he just waits. He already knows she will tell her story. It will only take a minute now.

“Alright. Any advice on where to start?”

Familiar ground, finally. “The deadly sins are usually a good place to start.” 

He leans back, trying to get comfortable. He doesn’t know her exact age but he knows that this will not be the brief confession of a troubled mortal mind, easy to soothe with a few words and a few prayers. 

“Not envy,” she decides as a start, “Not really. Greed…only if it pertains to people. I’m obsessive. I’ve never given up those that belong to me.”

He knows that. He is one of those people, after all. He belongs to her as a friend, a confidant and sometimes a shoulder to lean on when she needs one and Methos is off somewhere, losing and finding himself. She wouldn’t let him go without a fight. 

“Sloth….Nah. No more than anyone else. I like action too much. Can’t sit still. Gluttony isn’t my style either. And I refuse to see lust as a sin.”

He bites back a very un-priestly snort. “I know.” 

By God, how many times has he caught her and that husband of hers in compromising situations? And they strictly refused to share his embarrassment every time, telling him instead that it was time he got some for himself if he blushes like a school boy at things he once partook in.

She interrupts his thoughts with the question, “That’s five. What’s left?”

He takes a second to remember what they are talking about. “Pride and wrath.”

“Oh,” she whispers and he knows that this is where the hard part starts, “Those. Plenty of those. And the dead. So many dead.”

“We have all killed many times.” It is the best comfort he can offer, warrior to warrior. Even if one of them hasn’t seen a battlefield in a millennium. But he remembers the feel of mortal bones breaking under his sword, of skin giving and blood gushing. It is not something that will ever leave him. In that, all immortals are the same. To live, they kill.

She refuses the straw he offers, “Not like this, Darius. Not like this.”

“Tell me then.” Gentle now, and soft.

“I’m trying.” That edge of hysteria is back suddenly. “Gods, Methos… has Methos ever…has he told you what we were?”

Over the years they have both told him many things, things so fantastic he sometimes had trouble believing them. When drunk, Methos talks too much. But never this. He hears it in her voice now. No-one has ever told him about this. Or rather, they have never talked about this with anyone.

“No.”

“We were gods. Gods among insects.” He should take offence to that, should protest. This is a house of God, not gods. But she is older than this God he worships and he is old enough to know that narrow lines make for bad faith.

Instead he asks, leading, “Benevolent gods?”

She laughs. It’s a sound too loud for the cavernous room. “Benevolent. That word wasn’t even invented then. We were vengeful. We were angry. Even bored and wild and…never merciful. Not to anyone but our own.”

“Did you,” he has to ask, even if he can guess the answer already, “Did you kill for fun?”

He was raised for honour and dignity and the glory of battle and this is the one thing that to him, is truly a sin. The basest of depravities. But even so, he recognizes that his morals aren’t those of others and creatures like Summer and Methos might be entirely beyond modern morality.

Her answer comes slowly, but it comes honestly. “No. Yes. I want to lie and say we had our reasons, that we did it for food and shelter and revenge, but mostly, we did it because we could. Because we weren’t weak anymore.”

She pauses. Swallows. “I made them. Methos, Kronos, even Silas and Caspian, although they were pretty much just themselves. But I never stopped them. They didn’t know anything but the killing. I did, though. I never stopped them. So yes. Yes, I did.”

Her voice is steady and flat, like she’s sure she just broke something irrevocably. Darius takes a deep, quiet breath. 

“Why?”

This time, she takes so long to answer, he starts to wonder if he’s not imagining the quiet sounds of her breathing, if she slipped away unnoticed. “Because I was terrified of being along again. Of them leaving me.” She snorts, explosive and sudden in the silence. “Of course that very refusal to reign them in is what drove us apart in the end, so there’s irony for you.”

Honesty is all he can give her at this point. Honesty for honesty. He was born in an age of order, of numbers and smooth words, politics and rules. Laws. When he was born, the world was already drawn on maps and into books, indexed and catalogued. Wrongly and incompletely, but there was order imposed on chaos. 

He can’t pretend to understand the world she hails from. He remembers asking Methos once, early on, how old he was when he died. His face is ageless, somewhere between twenty and forty forever, and he was curious. And Methos just blinked at him, blankly and asked, honestly stumped, “How would I know?”

“Didn’t you count?”

“What was the point? If you lived to adulthood, good, if you didn’t, you didn’t. here was no way to keep track anyway.”

“You had no writing?”

“Darius, my friend, we had no _numbers_.”

Where they hail from, the only law was Darwin’s and those that lost never made it into history. They say that the beginning of the world was hard. And hard things break easily, brittle to the bone. 

So he says, “I don’t know that I can judge you. I don’t think anyone can. I am old, Summer. But compared to you, I am a child.”

“Circumstances don’t excuse,” she refuses any justification he might offer.

“No,” he agrees, “But I have never known you to need excuses.”

A beat. “I didn’t. It was…it felt like a dream. Year after year, it might all have been a dream. Nothing was real, nothing mattered. I pushed down the memories, pretended I’d forgotten it all, and lived. I was free. Until today.”

There lies condemnation in her words.

“The baby,” he guesses and guesses right.

“Yes.” 

“Who is this child that she is so important to you?”

She laughs. “Me,” she breathesgaspswhimpers. “She’s me. Today is the day I was born. And twenty-seven years from now I’m going to condemn myself to the dawn of time. I’ll turn myself into _this_.”

For a thousand years she had come and gone from his church, his life. She has spent decades in these walls with him. But he has never seen her cry. Until today. 

Suddenly she demands, “You won’t tell, will you?” 

“I’m a priest,” he rebuffs gently even as his head spins and his hands shake in his lap. 

She laughs through her tears, “I feel guilty for telling you all this shit.”

“You shouldn’t.” And she shouldn’t. She needed to say them and he can live with knowing. “Even if I don’t understand. It’s okay.”

Maybe one day he will ask what she is talking about, what she knows about the future and the past. Maybe he never will. Some things are better left unknown and this… he is almost sure that this would scare him if he knew. He is a priest now, not a warrior. Fearless stubbornness is not a trait he retained. All he wants is peace. He hopes she can find hers.

“You know, Darius, you really are special.”

He smiles at her compliment and gratitude and refuses it as always. “No more so than you.”

“Thanks.” She offers as a goodbye. Nothing is solved but in her head, things appear clearer now. Sometimes the lost souls that find his church just need an ear to listen to their troubles. Sometimes, there is nothing else he or anyone can do for them. Summer will sort herself out and soldier on. She always does.

And as she rises from her seat and leaves the confessional he watches from a slit in the curtain as she passes the altar. She stops in front of it and tells Christ on the cross, “I fucking hate you assholes.”

Then she drops a few francs into a box and quietly lights a candle.

+

+

**Circle**

+

The alley has no name. She finds it not by any conventional means but spends a week walking a grey city, touching walls, tracing long forgotten paths, wringing memories from aeons past. 

Then she hides far up in the fire escape and waits. 

That’s where.

+

Ten years ago the first piece fell into her lap, quite literally. It hangs around her neck now, dangling between her breasts, waiting. A pendant to manipulate time and space. A tiny blue gem set in silver vines of ivy or some other forgotten plant from the edges of the world. All it takes is a drop of blood and a will of iron and then – 

That’s how.

+

The headhunter comes tearing around the corner at breakneck speed three nights later, shortly after two am. Her quickening rushes down his spine as he brakes hard, sword scraping along the wall. His eyes widen as he realizes his mistake. The alley is a dead end. 

He spins in time to see his would be victim skid around the corner and block his escape. The blonde woman doesn’t feel Sun’s quickening. It’s her own after all. She grins unconcernedly and lifts her sword in a ready stance.

“You weren’t trying to run from me, were you? Because attacking me and then running away? That’d be like totally bad form.”

That fire, that youth and energy and _passion_. She barely remembers ever being like that.

That’s when.

+

Ever since the pieces of the puzzle fell into place she has spent long hours staring at walls, trying to decide whether or not to be here, now, tonight. Whether or not to do this. 

Whenever she decided not to, Methos would walk into the room and smile at her and her resolve would crumble. 

Whenever she decided to do it, something would happen to remind her of age and time and bitterness and death and hunger and hate and brittle things.

But in the end it all comes down to two things. One, the one thing she has learned over the millennia is selfishness. She does not want to cease existing. She does not want to lose what she has here, now, tonight.

Two, she’s already done it, hasn’t she?

That’s why.

+

Below, a blonde whirlwind of life and mortal things swings her sword in a high arc, aiming for the head. She does not enjoy death. Does not take pleasure in bloodshed. Not yet. 

Her opponent ducks and spins, looking frantically for any means of escape. He knows his death now that he has seen its face and he wants to live. Insect. Tiny, pathetic, arrogant insect. He thought he could take the slayer’s head. Thought he could be a god. All he’ll be now is a nameless corpse in a nameless alley. 

“You know,” the slayer chirps, “You could at least hold still. I mean, you started this, remember?”

He swipes at her, overreaching, stumbling, skittering back like a scared animal. Up in the fire escape Sun smiles thinly. 

“It’s not fucking fair,” he suddenly snarls, “You shouldn’t even be one of us.” 

The smile falls from her face like lead and the glint in her eyes gains an edge that wasn’t there before. Resentment. Anger. He tried to unbalance her, instead he made her cold and razor sharp.

She stabs forward, pulls back, feints left and slices deep into his arm. His weapon dips. Her smile returns but it is fake, too bright, too cheery. 

“Well,” she suggests, “That’s what happens when you get resurrected by your best friend and resident witch. Funny thing, huh?”

A moment later she has him on his knees, panting hard. He is dead and he knows it. But instead of giving up, of giving in, he rears up one last time and stabs her deep, deep in the gut. Then his head falls and he just _stops_.

The slayer looks down at her stomach and the sword sticking out of it and frowns. “Crap.”

Then the quickening fills the air with ozone and she dies in a storm of blue. 

+

Sun drops to the ground in a graceful leap, landing between two bodies. For a moment she stands very still, a ghost among ghosts, staring down at the face staring back at her. Staring at herself. A reflection in a reflection in a reflection, an endless row of mirrors stretching through forever. From the end of time to the very beginning. It makes her dizzy.

Then she kneels beside the blonde woman and pulls the sword out of her abdomen with practiced ease and no grimace. She wipes it clean and puts it away. Then she picks up the slayer’s scythe and places it on her chest carefully, a grave marker for one who will spend the next five thousand years dying but never dead. She misses that scythe since she placed it back in the cemetery for her other-self to find. 

She wonders if that means it has always existed, moebius strip of a thing, never created but always there. 

She nicks her finger on the blade and carefully places a drop of her blood on the centre of the pendant. She lays it over the other woman’s heart on pale bare skin, cooling rapidly in the chilly night air. She pushes all of her will and memories of sand and sun into the gem, pushes with all her might until it glows. 

She doesn’t worry that anything might go wrong. It didn’t. 

Then she stands, brushing a stray strand of honey out of her own – the slayer’s – still face. 

A moment later the portal starts to open with a crackle of blue, so similar to the lighting marking the death of one of their kind.

That’s the condemnation of self. 

+

+

**Cinders**

+

The city doesn’t last ten years. It might have been five, or fifteen. These things are rarely as straight forward and simple as history makes them out to be. 

The city doesn’t last ten years. But it lasts and when it falls it is in a storm of fire and sparks, brought down by trickery and betrayal, by dishonour and lies. 

These things mean nothing to Sun as she stands before the flaming gates of Troy and watches the Greeks slaughter thousands. Like time, these human follies - broken trust and broken bodies - cease to touch, eventually. 

(Or so she tells herself, late as night, when the nightmares keep her awake.)

Why does she fight this war then? She fights it because forever is a long time to be alone and there was a man, barely more than a boy, barely less than a crone, who caught her eye. Brave and loud, boisterous and arrogant, he calls himself a son of gods and maybe he is. He’s beautiful at any rate.

So here she stands, and Troy falls under Ulysses’ mind for trickery, a bitter king’s need for revenge and Achilles’ thirst for glory. It falls for trade routes and politics and wounded pride.

Sighing, she hefts her sword a bit higher and takes off toward the burning centre of the city. Might as well see how it ends.

+

She pulls a Greek off a teenage girl with disgust, knocking the man out with the pommel of her sword. She ignores the girl’s cries of gratitude and just keeps walking. She is not a benevolent goddess come to save this city. She is not a benevolent anything. She just….

A group of soldiers comes barrelling past her, weapons drawn, screaming and howling with adrenaline. With a raised eyebrow, she shrugs and follows. Just to find out what they are up to. This part of the city has been blooded, looted and burned already. There’s nothing left here. 

She catches up to them in a dead-end alley where they have cornered one of the Trojan lieutenants, by the looks of his armour. 

He is bloodstained, unarmed, cornered and – 

And he raises his head to meet her eyes across a horde of rabid enemy soldiers and what she sees stops her in her tracks.

He whispers her name in the tongue they once both spoke, before time began and they ended, back when there was only sun and heat and brittle things. Back when he had three brothers and she a family. 

She knew he wasn’t dead, would have felt it if he had died but to see him here, centuries later, face unchanged, seems surreal. And maybe that’s a good thing because she draws one of her hidden daggers, flings her sword at him and spins into an attack before he catches the weapon. Between them the mortal soldiers stand no chance, betrayal and confusion forever etched into their faces as one of their own slits their throats and tramples their corpses.

The last soldier’s last act is to stab him in the gut and as she spins to face him, he’s already dying. She sighs – whether in annoyance, sadness or exhaustion she doesn’t know – and finishes the last kill.

Somewhere closer to the palace, screams of rage and triumph proclaim Achilles’ death by Trojan hands. Even as they die by the thousands, this people still fights. She has to respect that.

Sheathing sword and dagger she grabs his arm and hauls it over her shoulders, intent on getting him somewhere more inconspicuous. With a grunt she decides that he’s gotten heavier.

+

He wakes minutes after the palace goes up in flames and the last of the Trojan city crumbles into anarchy and death. Tomorrow the streets will be washed clean by the blood of a whole people and new banners will be raised. The dead will be burnt, the survivors treated. 

One empire falls, another rises. How many times has she seen it now?

“Sun,” he says, vice rough from blood and the ever elusive death. He sounds uncertain. 

“Methos,” she returns, careful to keep her voice free of emotion.

He sits up with a groan, inspecting the bloody edges of the hole left in his armour. After a minute he declares his garments a lost cause and discards the breast plate and shirt, leaving him bare from the waist up. Then he stands.

“Thank you,” he says and offers her a hand up. 

She doesn’t take it, just nods toward the door. He knows the city better. She’ll follow. 

+

The city has fallen and whatever – whoever – either of them cared about is lost to them so the only thing left to do is for Methos to lead down a secret passage way and for Sun to follow in his wake. Not following never occurs to her. 

They reach the end of the tunnel by daybreak, finding what little is left of the royal family just after the last vestiges of night fade. Some raise weapons against the Greek but Methos pushes them down and simply shakes his head. Unsure of anything – their world, their future, their lives, their very existence - they obey. There is little else left to do. 

Sun just smiles at a little girl hiding behind her mother’s legs and picks up a pack to carry. They walk.

+

For three days the march, side by side. At night they gravitate toward each other at the edge of their little camp and during the day they read directions and suggestions off each other’s faces like they did an age ago. But they never speak a word.

Finally, on the afternoon of the third day they cross a small stream. Methos lifts a little girl over and then turns to give her a hand he knows she doesn’t need. Still she takes it, twists his arm and throws him into the chilly water. He winces as his back hits sharp rocks but makes not comment. 

The few warriors in the small group push the women back and aim their weapons at her. But she only has eyes for the man in the water and he knows it, stays motionless and awaits her verdict like he did when he was still young and she was all he knew.

“I would have come,” she finally says, voice even. The soldiers lower their weapons a bit.

Methos just keeps staring at her with those dark eyes, full of memory and regret.

“I would have come,” she repeats, desperate to get some reaction – any reaction – out of him. “All you had to do was ask. I would have left with you.”

His reaction, when it finally comes is the one she expected but not the one she wants to answer. Ever.

“Why?” He asks and he truly doesn’t know. After all this time, he still doesn’t know. 

She sinks onto the wet, muddy bank of the stream and wraps her arms around herself as the last weapons are lowered and the mortals on either shore avert their gazes in pity or shame. 

“Because you’re everything.”

+

For a few short moments he stares at her and it feels longer than any century ever has before he finally nods once and climbs to his feet.

He doesn’t apologize for leaving. He doesn’t ask for a better explanation. He doesn’t yell. He doesn’t declare his love and kiss her senseless. He doesn’t do anything but offer her a hand up. 

And when she takes it and stumbles, he is there to catch her.

+

+

**Fairy Tale**

+

The snow is deep.

It catches at the hem of her dress, wraps around her calves, climbs into her sodden boots and makes it hard, so hard to run. She’s panting harshly, her breath clouding in front of her face as she stumbles and pushes, sometimes half crawls over the uneven ground and through the trees.

Every now and then she throws a furtive look over her shoulder, trying to make out his dark form against the backdrop of a forest at dusk. And every time she does he is closer behind her und she can almost – almost – feel his wet breath trickle down her neck and freeze her from the inside out. 

Then, suddenly, salvation nears. She can make out the edge of the wood now, a red tinged line of sky and horizon, close, so close and there!

She breaks through the tree line and flings herself as the hooded and cloaked man. “Please, father,” she cries, breathing in sharp gasps, “Help me. I am being followed.”

The priest’s arms wrap around her immediately as he pulls her closer and scans their surroundings for danger. When he sees nothing after a moment he holds the tiny form at arm’s length and inquires, “Are you sure, my Lady? These woods are dark. You might have been mistaken.”

With a cry of distress she shakes her head, loosened golden curls tumbling about, framing her small face. Green eyes implore him to believe her. “No, father. I am sure. I could feel him, right behind me. He wanted to do vile things to me, I swear!”

From the tree line a snort can be heard followed shortly by a war cry as the ruffian bursts out of the underbrush with his sword raised. 

The poor maiden flings herself behind her saviour, yelling, “Help me, he will surely violate me!”

Cackling, the attacker takes a moment to leer at her and nod his confirmation. The priest meanwhile has pushed back his hood and drawn a sword from under his cloak. Bravely he stands before the girl and orders, “Leave off her! I will not let you harm her.”

Again deranged cackling is the only answer and then swords meet in a shower of sparks and dirty snow as the woman screams and jumps backwards as well as her sodden skirts allow. Momentarily distracted when she steps on the hem of her dress, she looks down and grumbles curses. Then, after extracting the garment from the heel of her boot she refocuses on the fight and promptly gives a cry of dismay. Her hero is losing ground. 

“No,” she calls, “Oh no. Kind Sir, you must not let him have me!”

The father sends her a disgruntled look over his shoulder before feinting right and stabbing left, catching the ruffian in the shirt and making him stumble. Two more parries and a final thrust see the bad man lying in a snow drift, unarmed.

“Please father,” he suddenly begs, arms raised defensively in front of him, “Spare my life!”

Sword aimed at the jugular the other man demands, “Why should I?”

The ruffian’s arms are lowered suddenly as he leers at the priest in a similar manner as he did at the girl before. “If you do, I’ll do that thing with my tongue that drives you crazy?”

Even as he slowly lowers his sword, the holy man’s severe expression falters, turning to one of mild exasperation and amusement. A moment later he bites back on a scream of surprise as he is suddenly tackled from behind by a full load of snow-covered girl intent on pushing him into the same snow drift his enemy is lying in.

He manages to throw away his sword in time to grab her wrist and pull her down with him and then all three of them are lying in the snow and laughing. 

“He will surely violate me,” the appointed ruffian suddenly squawks, voice effeminately high pitched. 

The prey punches him in the shoulder and returns the favour by sing-songing, “Spare my life, buh huh, I’m such a weak, defenceless little boy!” 

“I did not sound like that!”

The priest wipes snow off his face and rolls on his side, slinging on arm around the damsel’s waist. “Sorry, Methos, but you did. It’s amazing how pathetic you can sound.”

In retaliation, Methos grabs a handful of soggy snow and attempts to stuff it down the other man’s cloak and shirt. Between them, half smashed by chests and arms, the damsel is shrieking with laughter.

Before long the battle turns into an all out snow fight that only ends when full dark comes and the priest pushes the girl into the snow, head first. She kicks him in the shin and spits snow. “Darius, that’s not bloody fair!”

“Uh, uh,” he waggles a finger at her, “Everything is fair as long as you can get away with it. Isn’t that right, Summer? Besides, this whole game was your idea, if you care to remember.”

She swats him in the chest and then proclaims, “Well, don’t tell me you didn’t have fun playing the hero. But now I’m cold. And tired. Who gets to carry me home?”

Methos gives her a look that clearly states what he thinks of _that_ idea. Darius on the other hand gives her a speculative look. “What’s in it for me?” he finally asks.

Putting a finger to her lips in mock thought, Summer contemplates the matter for a moment before tapping her nose and saying, “I know. If you carry me home, I won’t kick you both out of the bed tonight and make you sleep on the floor.”

With a bow, the younger of the two men accepts. He motions for Methos to carry both their swords and then, before she has a chance to protest, grabs the lady around the waist and swings her onto his shoulder. 

They start the mile long walk home to the sounds of indignant shrieks and threats that can still be heard in the silent forest long after their forms have disappeared into the darkness toward the well-lit warmth of a church that keeps its priest’s secrets and keeps them well. 

+

+

**Vienna**

+

“You’re not trying to take off with the booty, are you?” a sleepy voice demands in the silence of the night.

A few feet away, a dark haired woman freezes in mid step, turning big, innocent eyes to the smaller woman on the bed. “Ehm….Would I do that?”

The blonde snorts and sits up, brushing wayward hair out of her face. “In a heartbeat,” she informs her companion.

Immediately the other puffs up in fake indignation, trying to hide the velvet bag full of jewellery behind her back. “Why, I have never…”

Interrupting, Summer glares tiredly, “Paris, Amanda.”

Amanda deflates. 

“And Rome.”

Lips pursed and eyes narrowed, the younger of the two immortals looks rather sheepish. 

“London. Venice. New York. Do I have to go on?”

“No?” More a question than a statement, unsure and properly cowed now. Amanda does not take orders from anyone and she’s pretty sure the older woman won’t take her head just for pissing her off but she’s not above making her _hurt_ for it. And, as a general rule, Amanda dislikes pain of any kind. Unless she’s the one inflicting it. Or it has to do with role playing games. Or a good fight. But she doesn’t like _unnecessary_ violence. Which Summer is not above using. 

So, with a shrug, she hands over the bag of booty and throws herself on the bed. “It’s not like you need it,” she tries to defend her attempted escape. “I’m sure you got a whole cave full of shiny things somewhere, hidden away.”

Her tone is light but she sneaks a peek at the other woman, just in case. If there really is such a cave…well, Amanda loves a good challenge, doesn’t she? 

Unfortunately, Summer’s face gives nothing away. She just asks, “Do we leave now or wait till morning?”

Shrugging, the taller of the two offers, “The Gräfin is probably still sleeping off the wine so we should be fine until morning, don’t you think?”

Her answer comes, not from the other woman, but from the sudden sound of a dozen heavy footsteps in the hall outside their rented suite. For a moment both women look at each other, wide-eyed. Then they both explode into action. 

Amanda jumps to her feet to barricade the door with a chair and a small closet while Summer throws on her dress with truly supernatural speed before grabbing the things they cannot leave behind (neatly packed away in a single small bag, in case of, well, this) and flings open the window.

Calling for Amanda to _move_ , she starts climbing outside, cursing her skirts and dainty shoes like a drunk sailor while she’s at it. She _hates_ dresses. Why can’t emancipation finally happen? Finally, after much flailing and swearing, she’s standing on the narrow sill and looking down. The jump is no trouble for her, but Amanda will probably break a leg, or worse. Damn. 

Salvation comes in the form of a late Fiaker, one of the open carriages that are Vienna’s taxis. Pulling the other woman up next to her, Summer points and then counts down from five. 

On _one_ both of them jump, landing perfectly on the passenger bench of the carriage and almost giving the driver and his horses a heart attack. 

“Zum Westbahnhof, bitte,” Amanda asks with a charming smile as soon as the aging man recovers. If they can make it to the train station, they are home free.

The man nods, still too startled to deny their request and takes off. Behind them, screams and angry curses cut the night to shreds as soldiers come pouring out of the hotel to find their targets lost in the pre-dawn gloom of Vienna in January. 

The women laugh, giggling their relief into the world even as they pull the provided blankets over themselves to stay warm. 

“God,” Amanda wheezes, “Did you see…?”

Summer nods and giggles, a sound that is entirely unlike her. But Amanda joins her because they have booty, their lives and fun on top of it. The plan went off without a hitch and soon they’ll be sitting on the early morning train out of the city and everything is going to be just _wonderful_.

Under the blankets, Amanda’s hands go wandering, but not, as Summer might believe, for the bag of gold and jewellery the other woman still carries, but for her hand. She finds it finally, takes it in hers, and holds it tight, eyes shining.

“I _love_ Vienna,” she declares, loudly, to be heard over the clattering of hooves and wheels.

Summer has herself under control once more, the giggles already a thing of the past as she starts planning their escape route and then another and finally another, just in case. 

But she smiles briefly at Amanda and squeezes her hand back just as tightly.

Oh yes, Amanda loves Vienna.

+

+

**Beer**

+

Methos is a myth. He tells Joe that with all the conviction of a man who _knows_. Methos is a myth. A story. If he ever existed, he’s certainly dead now. Duncan has seen men, good men, and women go mad with the grief of age. He has seen them beg for an end, any end, just to stop the merciless flow of time and life and death around them. 

He has seen time break the strongest people he has ever known. Some of them were centuries old, some only a few decades. Eventually, they all take the easy way out. 

Summer and Amanda are probably two of the oldest left now, with Amanda at a solid thousand and Summers around two.

To live to be thousands of years old…. Mac just doesn’t believe it. He doesn’t. So Methos is a myth and hunting him is a fool’s errand. And yet, yetyetyet, yet he walks up to Adam Pierson’s door and feels a quickening rush down his spine that shakes him to the bone. 

He draws his sword and carefully, slowly, lets himself into the apartment. The way things are going right now, the watcher is probably dead already and whoever is inside the apartment has taken all there was worth knowing. 

But then, as he closes the door silently behind him, another quickening hits, brushing across his skin like hot desert wind. He knows that quickening, knows it like he knows the sun above his head. Summer.

Summer, who is still a riddle after over a century, who never gives straight answers and disappears faster than sound. Summer, with her mysterious husband, her mad sword skills, her incredible stories and deep eyes. 

She’s supposed to be in Spain meeting her ever elusive husband, as far as he knows. 

He walks down the few steps into the main area of the apartment and then whirls, startled, as he hears a familiar giggle. Instantly, he blushes.

Summer is there alright, tangled in sheets and strong tanned arms belonging to a dark-haired man whose face is buried in her neck. She grins at Duncan over the man’s shoulder and then smacks his back with an open palm saying, “Honey, we have company.”

A dark head turns and darker eyes sparkle brightly in his direction for a second before the man returns to his task. “He can join us.”

Again, she smacks him and with a long suffering sigh, the man finally leaves off her neck and rolls to the side. The blonde draws the sheets around her and sits ignoring the rumbled complaint of, “I want a divorce, bloody wench.”

Divorce? Does that mean this is – 

Before he gets to finish the thought Summer says, “Honey, this is Duncan MacLeod. Mac, meet my husband, Adam Pierson.”

Adam Pierson. Watcher. Methos’ watcher. Supposedly a mortal. Except he has a quickening and … Duncan’s brain finally comes back and he whispers, staring dumbly, “Methos.”

The man on the bed grins roguishly and strikes a pose while his wife laughs out loud beside him. 

Methos is a myth. Methos isn’t real. No-one can live to be as old as Methos. No-one it’s just not…

He stands there, staring stupidly, understanding suddenly why Summer never ever dropped her husband’s name at all. Married to the oldest living immortal. Sweet God, the lass just never stops surprising him. He opens his mouth to say something – anything, when Methos moves.

The man rolls to the edge of the bed, sitting, completely unashamed of his nudity and bends to a cooler box by the bedside table, pulling out two cans. He holds one up and looks at the Highlander curiously, “Beer?”

Mac blinks. 

+

+

**Family**

+

When Fitz comes bearing news of immortals around the world slaughtered by mortal hand, the pieces click into place fast. Who knows about them? Who knows their weaknesses and how to exploit them? There has been a split among the watchers recently, Methos – or rather Adam – says. She might be blonde but she is not stupid.

And so she slips out of the room and off the barge while Mac and Fitz are still paralyzed by the knowledge that someone is breaking their most sacred, their few and only, rules. Fight one on one. Fight off holy ground. Use only blades. 

Three rules. All of them broken. She can see how that might shake someone’s faith in the world. Personally, she’s always survived by expecting the worst of people and hoping for the best. Occasionally, it even works out. And if it doesn’t…well. She’s older than those rules, isn’t she?

+

It’s not hard to figure out who they’ll go for first. Who is there in Paris that poses as tempting a target as Darius in his church, a sitting duck that doesn’t even know hunting season has been declared?

First she’ll make sure he is safe. Then she’ll have a little heart to heart with watchers who forgot the meaning of their title. 

+

She scares the holy man half to death when she suddenly appears behind him as if by magic, tapping him on the shoulder. He spins around, old reflexes only dulled, not forgotten, and she is forced to clamp a steely hand over his mouth to keep him quiet. He calms as soon as he recognizes her, a millennium of trust overriding any natural instincts he might have.

“Summer, what-“ 

She cuts him off with a sharp shake of her head, hearing the great doors of the main entrance open. “We’ve got to get out of here,” she tells him in a voice that tells him that the choice is between death and leaving holy ground. He is a pacifist, not dumb.

Launching himself out of his chair he takes a moment to rid himself of her insistently pulling hand to kneel before a random piece of wall and extract an old book, the pages signed and stinking of ash and fire. He shoves it into a pocket and nods at Summer.

They move.

+

As they slip into a hidden passageway leading into the catacombs and from there into the sewers, the church above them is torn apart by rage and hate. 

+

Hours later they have made it back to the barge safely, Darius undercover in civilian jeans and button up shirt, looking strange and alien after all these years in the brown garb of faith. 

Fitz and Mac come pouring in the door like a thunderstorm, like grief and rage. Darius is gone, the church pulled to pieces. They probably killed or kidnapped him for information. They have no lead, no trace, no face to give the enemy. Nothing. Only helpless anger and fear.

She stands slowly, silently, ignoring their outrage and pain, stepping to the side to reveal the priest, still clutching the book he salvaged. 

“Hello,” he says, not quite managing to keep the smile off his face. It is good to know that he would be missed if he were gone. Mac stands with his jaw on the floor, all the manic energy leaving him, while Fitz almost swallows his tongue.

Then he rounds on Summer and demands, “How?”

She shrugs. “What’s family for, if not this?”

Fitz nods and pulls out his pipe but Mac is less relaxed. He’s known Summer long enough to know that there is more to this than blind luck. “You know who’s killing these immortals,” he says.

She nods and sits back down, relaxed expression wiped off her face as she reaches for the book and Darius hands it to her without protest. “Let me tell you about a secret organization called the Watchers.”

+

+

**Then and Now**

+

Things used to be different. 

They used to be easy. Steal a wallet, have a good time, tune a bike, have a better time. Easy peasy. Don’t sweat the law, or rules, or the future. Live in the moment. Be happy. You never know when it might end. 

And then, trying to rob some old fart of his antiques. Only the old fart turned out to be a guy that could squash him like a fly and immortal to boot. And Richie Ryan’s world view tilted.

Badly. 

But that was okay. There was a new kind of a fun all of a sudden. The fun that comes with having food without stealing it, of having a friend to bicker with and a hot woman to feed him and hug him like a mother might. People to lean on. People to go to the movies with and hang out.

It was good.

Sure, there was the occasional maniac who tried to take Mac’s head and use it for a bowling ball, but Mac was Mac and that meant he always kicked ass. 

So his new life could be summed up like this: working in the shop, going to the movies, washing blood from his favourite jeans, helping Tessa make dinner, running for his life, tuning Mac’s car and getting kidnapped once every couple of months. And it was all easy, all cool, because for the first time in forever there was someone _there_. When he messed up there was a second chance and when he did something stupid, there was a third chance and when he asked why the hell he was getting all these chances Tessa smacked him for cursing and Mac told him that that’s what family does. 

That left him kind of speechless.

The fun times turned a little less fun when the Watchers entered stage left but Mac saved the day because that’s what Mac does. And there was that friend of his, tiny, blonde, sexy thing, who saved Darius’ life so it was all good. 

He would go so far as to use words like warm, fuzzy, happy, comfortable and content to describe that year. It was the best of his life.

And then it ended. It ended with a bullet that came at him, straight as an arrow, straight as a fucking _bullet_ fired from the gun of a guy who wasn’t worth the dirt he stood on. The bullet came, and came and came and he swears, if you ask him, swears that he could see it, watched it as it came closer, closer, closer and then…

It killed him.

It.

Killed.

Him.

Richie Ryan left the building, kicked the bucket, gave up the ghost, threw in the towel, bit the dust and simply, fucking _died_. 

And then he woke up. And he was glad, so very glad for a few hesitant heartbeats. Glad that he was alive, yes, but most of all glad that things could go back to normal. He hadn’t died and everything would be all right. His shirt was ruined. He’d throw it away and put on a fresh one and the three of them, Mac, Tessa and him would curl up at home and watch a crappy movie and the good times would come back.

Except they never did. 

Tessa dead, Mac a mess, the store sold, happy life over, all fun-ed out. 

He wants to say, story of my life, but it’s not. It’s not supposed to be. He survived getting killed, damn it. Doesn’t that somehow entitle him to being happy? To having a good life? 

Apparently not. 

So Richie Ryan’s world view tilts again. 

Antiques are replaced by punching bags and exercise mats, tuning cars becomes learning to wield a sword and there is no Tessa anymore to put a smile on Mac’s face, to cook dinner and remember to pick up movies for the weekends. 

Instead of Tessa there is another blonde suddenly, the one that saved Darius. But she is sharp and dangerous underneath the sweet packaging, hard and cold. There is nothing homely about her, no comfort, no peace. No hugs and words of encouragement. Where Tessa spent her time with Mac messing around with ice-cream on the kitchen table, this new girl spends it fighting with him.

They beat on each other for hours and hours, fighting until they are both bloody, Mac more so than her. And when they’re finished the look in Mac’s eyes is soft and mellow, not with peace, but with fatigue, with bone deep numbness, with physical pain to dull the emotional one. 

When Tessa died, Mac broke and this new blonde lets him wallow, lets him hate and be silent. She sees the dead look in his eyes – has to – and she leaves it there, untouched. All she does it fight with him, make him angry, get him to scream with rage. She burns him out.

“You’re hurting him,” Richie says one night, after Mac has gone for a shower and he’s scraped together his courage. She’s sitting on the mats in the dojo, picking on a chipped nail.

At the sound of his voice she looks up, blinking slowly. As if she didn’t know he was there. Yeah, right. Bitch, Richie thinks. 

“Yes,” she says after staring for a long minute. “I probably am.”

“Well then, how about you stop!?”

Her hands drop into her lap as she pulls her legs under herself. “And then he would do what?”

He rolls his eyes, pissed-off, hurting and wanting to hurt someone else in turn. Tessa used to be good at soothing the ugly parts of him, but Tessa is gone. (The wrong person came back.) “I don’t know, get over it?”

She laughs. He flinches. “Get over it? Oh, honey, you’re sweet. Time gonna heal all wounds?”

He nods. Eventually, Mac has to get better, right? She laughs again and looks up at him with earnest eyes. “Well, that’s bullshit.”

She stands suddenly, smoothly. “Time breeds infection, breeds disease and even if you survive that, it’ll leave you with hella ugly scars. No. Wounds need to be cleaned, need to be burned out. Then they can heal. Time has nothing to do with it.”

Then she spins on her naked heel and marches toward the door, intent on leaving. And Richie bites his lip and calls after her, “Yeah, well, I still think you’re doing more harm then good.”

She stops and looks at him over her shoulder, looks and smiles a smile that is condescending and older than some of the antiques he handled, back in the happy days. Then she walks out and Richie is left to clean up the savaged training area and scrounge up something to eat for Mac and himself.

Things used to be different.

Before all the tilting and dying, they used to be easy.

+

+

**Coffee Shop Blues**

+

In hindsight, meeting Duncan McLeod might have been the best thing that’s ever happened to Joe Dawson. Sure, he almost lost his job over it, his old friends avoid him like he’s a teenager with herpes and he’s getting bitch slapped by his bosses at every turn, but the knowledge, oh the knowledge. 

To discuss history with someone who has been there, to get an eyewitness account of Culloden from a man who stood in the front lines. Sure, he could read the same things in the journals, could look them up, get the information without running the risk of losing his job but it’s just not the same. 

It’s not. 

There is magic in Mac’s words, his recollections, his emotions. Truth. A man who spent his life hunting ghost stories and vague hints values truth above anything else. 

So, when the Highlander comes to him seeking information Joe hesitates just long enough to get a deal out of the olderyounger man. Information for information. Tit for that. You gimme something, Mac, I give you something back. 

It works fine for them both. A few simple accounts for a little information. A location for an unanswered question in the journals. A name for a story. 

But then Mac asks for the jackpot. Asks for something even Joe in his quest for truth hesitates to give. He wants to read his own file. He wants to know everything the Watchers know about him and he wants it now. Why, he doesn’t say. Curiosity maybe. Or perhaps he’s looking for something in the footnotes, some long lost memory, a lover. But those files contain information on every immortal he has ever met, living or dead, and on every watcher that’s ever come within a hundred miles of him. And that makes it dangerous. That makes the request more than Joe can justify with thirst for knowledge. So he tries to decline, starts saying no. Starts saying, that’s too much.

And then Mac, damn him, dangles the scrap of a lifetime in front of Joe. He says, “Do you have records of the woman I met during the war in France, 1916?”

The watcher stops and stares, wide-eyed. Mac is volunteering information on _her_? They have records of her, oh yes, they do. The most patchy, half-assed, uninformative records he has ever seen. They know she is friends with Darius. They know she is friends with the Highlanders, both of them. They know she has pulled some stunts with Amanda. They know half a dozen aliases. And that’s where the knowing stops and the guessing starts. 

Some records put her at two thousand years old, some at almost five. Some say she came out of obscurity with Methos, at the beginning of time. Others murmur that she was in Troy, helped build Rome, knew Cleopatra. If one believes all those rumours, she’s the busiest person to ever have lived. But even if you don’t believe all that, even if you believe less than half of all the stories, she’s the myth that every watcher wants to crack, right up there with Methos, the oldest living immortal. 

She’s not the holy grail, not quite. That honor goes to the oldest living immortal, one Methos, real or not. But she makes a pretty damn good consolation prize. 

Hesitantly, Joe nods, trying to keep the expression of childlike glee off his face. There are few other immortals that the Watchers know so little about, mainly due to the fact that she has ways of disappearing that fool even modern technology. One moment she enters a café in Rome, the next she’s lost for another decade, then pops up again in Beijing, sitting in a park, reading the newspaper. She’s never had a watcher for more than a few months at a time and even that always felt like she was allowing the observation, the journals are clear on that. 

Mac smiles his winsome smile and says, “I’ll bring her to meet you.”

This, Joe imagines, is how a die-hard fan might feel if someone told them they can meet a back-from-the-dead Elvis. 

+

Three days later he is sitting in a random coffee shop, bouncing his cane on one nerveless leg, waiting for Mac to bring the not-quite holy grail to him, all in exchange for a few ratty brown files, filled with journals, scraps and loose pages of notes. 

They come in like any couple out for early lunch might, holding hands, wearing sunglasses, talking in low voices. The only thing breaking up the idyllic view is their choices in clothing. McLeod is wearing his usual trench coat, to hide his sword while the woman at his side has voted for skin tight black leather pants and a shirt that definitely hides no weapon of any kind, unless it’s a toothpick. 

Mac waves and pulls the woman – she looks barely twenty but even in his head, Joe can’t justify calling her a girl – over. They sit next to each other and the Highlander makes introductions. 

“Summer,” he says, “Meet Joe Dawson. Joe, meet Summer.” 

Joe considers asking if Summer is like Madonna, but bites his tongue at the last moment, holding out his hand to shake instead. Summer takes it and then suddenly twists, baring the tattoo on his wrist. 

“Okay,” she says and her voice is a little high, her accent a little strange. Perfectly average. “Nice meeting you Joe, I gotta be going now.”

She tries to stand. Mac’s hand shoots out, grabbing her by the arm and pulling her back down. She allows it, Joe is sure. “Hold on for a second, okay? Joe is a friend. He’s doing me a favour.”

She looks at him long and hard, then relaxes a fraction. “Then why am I here?”

Suddenly the unflappable immortal looks a bit flustered, “Well, in return for the favour, I’m doing Joe a favour and –“

She cuts him off with a roll of her eyes and finishes his sentence. “And that favour is dragging me here. Cuz I’m famous, right? I don’t think so.”

She stands again. 

“Please,” Joe blurts, “Just a few questions. You don’t have to answer. Just… please. Ma’am.”

Later Joe decides it’s probably the Ma’am that did her in. She’s a sucker for that kind of thing, if only because it cracks her up. “Three,” she says, without sitting back down. “Three questions in return for Mac’s damn favour and I reserve the right not to answer. And when we’re done, I’m beating the stupid Scot up.”

Joe grins from ear to ear and Duncan squirms. Apparently getting beaten up by five feet of blonde fluff is not something he looks forward to. 

“Deal,” he agrees and she sits back down.

“So,” he starts that the first question really isn’t one he has to think about. But then the waitress comes and they all order coffee and wait until she’s out of earshot again. 

Then, “How old are you?”

She laughs. It’s a sound like sunrise and nails on chalkboard, like summer heat and butterflies. She shakes her head, “Hasn’t anyone ever told you that it’s not nice to ask a lady her age.”

He pouts, best as he can, being an old man and all that, “Come on, a deal’s a deal.”

A shrug. “If you insist,” she smiles, “I have no idea.”

He scowls darkly and Mac chuckles as he leans back in the booth. “That’s not the deal we had.”

“Hey, you asked, I answered. I really, truly have no idea how old I am.”

She leans her elbows on the table and looks at him, honestly, earnestly. She doesn’t know. Sweet baby Jesus, she doesn’t know. Older than calendars, older than any known measure of time. Older than time itself perhaps. A being that has no age. Or maybe just one that was born in a village, somewhere at the end of the world, with no literate record keeper on hand. He doesn’t think that’s it, somehow. Joe shudders and tries not to let it show, tries not to let on how totally alien the concept seems to him. To be so old to have lost track of time, of yourself. 

He considers wasting his second question on asking for big events she remembers, to try and pin her down somewhere in history. Instead he decides to ask another question, similar, but useful in itself.

“Second one then, what famous people did you know?” He does not ask if she knew Cleopatra. He is not a fan, he reminds himself, he is a scientist. A keeper of records and journals. Of knowledge.

She shrugs. “Famous people? You do realize that there were twice as many great people in the world than the ones still remembered today, don’t you? And the ones you remember today are usually not the… best of people. They were either obsessed or tragic figures.” A smirk, “The cool people never make it into the books.”

She leans back and closes her eyes, starts ticking of names in apparent enjoyment. Both men are fixed on her, eager to not miss a second. “There is Caesar, of course. Met him when he was still a lowly general. A touch fanatic in his convictions, but hey, who isn’t. Charlotte Corday and no, I’m not telling you why she really did it. What else… I hung around when the Medici were big, knew most of them. A couple of popes, Henry VIII I met briefly. I wasn’t anywhere near Jerusalem two thousand years ago. I could make you a list, but it would probably take a decade or so. Next question.”

She tacks on a grin that’s all teeth and showmanship and Joe doesn’t need to be able to read her to know that was a speech designed to tease more than answer. Practiced in the mirror, probably. 

Well, he figures, at least he has some starting points now. She was in the Roman Empire in Caesar’s days. She was in France for the revolution. He might be able to trace her that way. Now, how to use his third question. For scientific purposes, for his own curiosity, or simply to get what he craves most. Truth. A kind of truth only time can give you.

Before he can change his mind he asks, “What did you learn?”

She seems taken aback by the question, startled. Mac, too. They didn’t expect him to ask for fundamental truths. They expected him to want facts. 

The coffee comes and she sips it slowly, looking out the window, ignoring both men sitting with her. For almost ten minutes, they’re silent. Then she speaks, her voice a whisper.

“Nothing changes. Faces and names, places, things, yes, but the essential truths remain the same. People are still greedy, needy, desperate. They still love and hate the same way they did… a long time ago. The fabric the world is made of never changes.” She turns her head, looks Joe right in the eye, wills him to understand. He tries. “If nothing changes then the same kind of people will inevitably make the same decisions, leading to the same events. If you look close enough and long enough, then every war, every death is the same. So yeah, history really does repeat itself, endlessly. 

“And last but not least,” she looks away again, “You always forget the good things.”

Something lifts and moves as she finishes speaking, and air rushes back into the room. Joe exhales and Mac says, “That’s not true. You don’t forget the good things, not only. Not always.”

She puts her mug down and turns to look at him, head cocked slightly. “What colour were the eyes of the first girl you loved, Duncan?”

She waits for only a moment, watching the younger immortal flounder, trying to remember. Then she goes on, “And how did she die?”

Mac’s mouth snaps shut with an audible click and she lays her head on her crossed arms on the table and closes her eyes.

“Wait long enough,” she says, “And the good things all go away.”

+

+

**Change**

+

_I looked away_

+

The first time Methos asks what she was like, she changes the subject. The second time she distracts him, as well as the third and fourth. Time and again, she manages to slip from his grasp and not answer the question – 

“What were you like, before?”

She doesn’t know how to answer. He knows her, knows all her nooks and crannies, her every secret and grief, her joys and her memories. He’s known her for millennia, knows where she comes from, where she went, who she’s been. But what he asks of her is more than that, more than knowledge. It’s self. 

And she barely remembers that.

+

_you were on fire_

+

But he keeps asking and eventually, she gives in. She gives in, drags him to the car and drives him several hundred miles to Sunnydale, California. There she parks across the street from the local high school and motions for him to get out. He complies and she drives off before he can ask a single question.

He comes home two days later to find her lying in bed, staring at the ceiling with unseeing eyes. He stops in the doorway, looks at her for a long time and then walks past her into the bathroom. He strips his two-days-worn clothes off and takes a long, slow shower that leaves him feeling approximately two hundred years younger.

He brushes his teeth, puts on clean boxer shorts and a t-shirt and sits next to her unmoving form. Only then does he speak. 

“That’s not you.”

“Yes it is.”

He shakes his head and trails long fingers over her hair, down her cheekbones, over the slope of her lips. “She doesn’t even look like you.”

Her eyes shift, her gaze lands on him and one eyebrow rises. His hand drops into his lap and he chuckles. “Alright, so she does, but only superficially. You’re different people.”

He lies next to her, stretched out across the length of the bed and presses a kiss to her forehead. Lips still against her skin he speaks in a long forgotten tongue, “You are my desert goddess.”

She smiles.

+

_I’ve watched a change in you_

+

“Really,” he adds because he knows her and he knows that she doesn’t believe him. “She’s nothing like you.”

She nods, shrugs, manages to finally turn her eyes on his face. “It’s a shock. Seeing her… seeing who I was. I’d forgotten.” She laughs suddenly. “I should have killed her when she was a baby. Spared myself the whole thing.”

He rolls on his back. It’s his turn to stare at the ceiling as he demands, somewhat doubtfully. “You would have killed yourself?”

“The reminder of what I was,” she corrects. As if the other her is not her. As if it would not be a convoluted form of suicide, to kill her own childhood incarnation. As if the girl he spent a full day watching, following her around, is nothing but a mirror, held up to show an ancient woman her roots and flaws.

She swings her arm up and over him, resting it on his chest, stroking lightly. Her face settles in the nook between his shoulder and neck, nestled under his chin. “But it’d be no use. I keep telling Mac that I don’t remember but that’s a lie. The important bits never went away. And the rest came boiling back up when she was born.”

His arm settles around her waist in a motion as familiar as his own face, and almost as old. He holds her close and grunts something akin to agreement into her hair. It is enough.

“Sometimes I wish we could lose our memories like our lives. Just die, forget everything and come back up clean. Move on. Start a new life. Forget everything we ever were. That wouldn’t be so bad, would it? You can’t miss what you can’t remember.”

His fingers draw lazy patterns on her side as he stares at the ceiling, turning her proposal over and over in his head. To forget everything? “Wouldn’t that be reincarnation instead of immortality?”

She shrugs but doesn’t move otherwise. “A clean slate. Doesn’t matter what you call it, does it?” There’s a smile in her voice as she adds, almost as an afterthought, “Not like you’d remember what it’s called anyway.”

He snorts and tugs at her a bit before relaxing back into the mattress. He keeps his eyes open, though, fixed on the blank expanse of white above him. If he closes them, he thinks, he’ll see the other one. The little girl that is nothing like his Sun but burns the same way. Only hotter. Brighter. Her edges are duller but her colours so much more vibrant. If he closes his eyes and thinks of her, he might start missing things he never had. 

Speaking of the loss of precious things, “Would you really give it all up?”

A long silence.

“I don’t know.” Frustrated. “I don’t know. I’m just tired.”

He pulls her tightly into his side and listens as her breathing evens out and she falls asleep slowly, clinging to him like she has for a thousand years and more, a weight that he always misses when he sleeps alone. He pulls the sheets over them both and turns off the light, one handed, before settling down, too.

He keeps his eyes wide open.

+

_it’s like you never had wings_

+

+

**Tipsy**

+

Mac watches as his companion taps the bartop with a single perfectly manicured nail, wordlessly ordering a refill for her whiskey. The bartender complies with a smile and a wink and she doesn’t seem to mind.

Mac does. He scowls and takes another sip of his own tumbler, looking at her gloomily.

“What’s wrong?” she asks, noticing his maudlin expression.

“You’re flirting with the barkeep,” he says as if that explains everything. And it would. If they were on a date or a couple or married. Which they are not. They are two adults out for a drink or fifteen. She can flirt with whoever she wants. Really. 

“Yes,” she confirms, voice bland. Thin ice, Mac. 

He empties his glass, spins it between the fingers of one hand and hunches down into himself. “How long have we known each other?” he demands, not looking at her.

She sighs, shakes her head hard enough to send long hair flying. It’s criminally unfashionable, the way she wears her hair. Yet all gazes seem to be drawn to it. “Goodness, tell me you’re not a nostalgic drunk. Those are the worst.” 

Especially among their kind, where nostalgia can span anything from a decade to a millennium, goes unsaid. He huffs and scoffs and gets another refill before turning accusing eyes on her.

“Fifty years, that’s how long we’ve known each other. You an’ me and you and – “ he draws circles in the air with one digit, trailing off as his Scottish brogue becomes thicker with ever word. “Long time, that.”

She nods, waiting, patiently and not half as drunk as he is. “An’ all this time,” he continues after another sip, “All this time – “

“Yes?”

“You haven’t slept with me once. I’ve tried, ye ken? Flirtin’ with you every chance. Been a good lad around you, real nice. But ye dun’t see me at all. It’s like you’re _married_.” The ‘r’ rolls wickedly off his tongue and he feels heavy and a bit angry

She blinks, surprised. Maybe the first real reaction to his drunk confessions. “I am.”

“What?” Four hundred years of fighting reflexes is the only thing that keeps him on his chair as the question explodes out of his mouth and half the patrons turn to him, wondering if he’s quite alright, thanks a lot. 

She smiles tightly, using one small hand to push him back into his seat properly. It looks like she’s patting him on the shoulder, yes, but she’s really turning him around in the chair, moving him like he weighs nothing more than a feather. How does she do it? He has no idea. It’s another of the things he doesn’t know about her and probably never will. 

Still he follows the wordless order in that commanding touch and turns back to the bar, wrapping long fingers around his empty glass, glowering at the barkeep’s back. 

“I thought,” he says after careful consideration, “I heard ye say you’re married.”

“You did.” She taps the bar again, holding up two fingers this time and receiving her order quicker than anyone else in the room. Oh, someone’s sweet on the lass. She keeps one glass for herself, slides the other in his direction and downs the whiskey like it’s water. She should be as tipsy as him, but she doesn’t even react to the burn. 

“D’ye ever get drunk?” he finds himself wondering out loud and then fixes his gaze on his glass to avoid looking at her. He should have stopped three drinks ago. 

She shrugs and leans back, one arm slung over the back of her chair. “I used to.” Her nose wrinkles cutely as she tries to remember something and probably – as usual – fails. “I think.”

“Where’s that husband of yours then?” He sounds nasty even to his own ears, disbelieving and spiteful. He’s drunk and he wants her and suddenly she is _married_. There’s a bitter taste in his mouth.

“Greece, last time I heard of him. Headed for Troy.”

“Playin’ tourist then?”

Another shrug, another glass and she gulps it down in total disregard of money, disbelieving looks and taste. “Haunting the ruins of the places we once knew.”

Silence.

Her mood is like a pendulum, to and fro, up and down and he can never predict where it will go next, can never prepare himself for those shifts from flippant to serious, to joking, to old, so old. She was there? She saw Troy? Which one? Counting the Roman settlement there, the city lived, in some form or another, almost until his time. Is that what she means? Illium and it’s slow, steady decline? Or does she mean Troy herself? Was she there with Schliemann and so many others, only a hundred years ago? She can’t have possibly seen the original – the famous….

She’s distracting him.

But at some point in time, she was there. With her bloody husband. Meaning…. Well, he’s currently not sure what that means but he _is_ sure it doesn’t bode well for his planned seduction.

“I hate ye,” he suddenly says, unable to keep the thought inside, unwilling perhaps. She never talks, never shares, never gives him anything at all, except scraps meant to confuse more than explain. He’s not ashamed to admit that he’s not used to being treated like furniture. 

She laughs, head thrown back, mouth open, sweet and seductive as always. Heads turn again and she ignores them in favour of looking at him with a certain… fondness. Acknowledging his words without being hurt by them. Fifty years and he’s yet to find anything that really touches her. Even those dying boys in the trenches didn’t get to her. Not deep down. Not the heart of her. 

“So ye’ve turned me down all those years because you’re married.”

“I think,” she decides, “It’s time we got you home. You’re drunk and rambling and while you might not remember tomorrow, I will.”

“No.” He doesn’t want to move. Really. The world is sort of off kilter and he likes it here. With her. Talking. Getting her to open up just the tiniest bit. Truth and booze. They work so well together.

“Yes. Now move or I’ll make you, thick-headed Scot.”

He stands but it’s just to get her to stop bugging him and he lets her hook her arm into his, holding him up more than apparent to the untrained eye. The barkeep gives her a look, silently asking if she needs help with the drunk oaf at her side. He snarls at the man and lets her pulls him to the door.

“I’m movin’,” he declares, somewhat unnecessarily, “And ye’re bloody married.”

“This is getting repetitious,” she complains, a cute pout on her face. And then they’re outside and the cold night air hits him in the face like a slap and he feels at least three of his drinks draining from his system as the world becomes sharper again. 

He groans. Pulls at her arm. Gets her to stop. 

“Do you love your husband?” he demands, accent already fading as reality returns. He knew there was a reason he didn’t want to leave the pub.

She nods, accepting that they will have this conversation, whether she wants to or not.

“Do you love him?” He repeats the question because he has to be very, very sure.

“I have for longer than I remember.” Fact. Nothing more.

He tries not to flinch as he looks up at the stars and says, “Never stood a chance, did I?”

She laughs suddenly, loud and honest and he jerks his head down to look at her in puzzlement. “We’ve been together for thousands of years, Mac. Do you really think we’ve both been faithful all this time?”

“Then why?”

She grabs his arm suddenly, having let go of it before, and tugs him close. “Frankly?”

He nods. “You fuck everything that moves and I like you too much to be a notch on your bedpost. Be kinda sad, doncha think?”

She clicks her tongue, grinning up at him. Her words, as they sometimes do, sound too free, too strange to be of this century. Yet at the same time, too crass to be of any past age. He wonders where she learned English.

But he also wonders where she got the idea from that all he wants from her after all these years, is another notch on whatever bed he is currently calling his own. Instead of asking he relaxes into the remainder of his chemical high and wraps an arm around her, suddenly and heartily.

“Ah, lass,” he tells her, laying on it thick, “Haven’t I told ye that I love ye? No point in hangin’ around with ye fer so long if I didn’t.”

He makes big eyes at her, leering just a bit, preening and then huffing as she laughs and makes to shove him away. Instead of letting go he leans on her more heavily. Hard enough, in fact, to make anyone stagger. 

Anyone but her and strangely, he’s come to expect it. Just like he expects her to pop up out of nowhere, to always know things, to drop famous names of history like they mean nothing, implicit promises she never keeps. Like he expects her to never get drunk and always win a fight and never let him kiss her.

So it’s kind of a surprise when she pulls out from under his arm, leaves him to stumble, balance lost, and then stretches up to press her lips to his as soon as he has regained his feet.

But he’s certainly not complaining.

+

+

**Prey**

+

After they went for Darius in his church, there can be no doubt that they will come for her. For watchers she is the holy grail, or at least a map to it, for rogue watchers the antichrist. Oh, the thin line of religious metaphors. Unlike Methos she has never bothered to erase her steps, content to let mortal men dog her steps and try to figure her out, knowing they never would get to the core of her secrets. He’s the mystery they want to solve, but she’s the one leaving traces, so they try and fail to solve her instead while Methos laughs in the background. Both of them wait for the day some industrious young watcher figures out that Sun’s traces cover Methos’ almost seamlessly, hiding him, confusing them and never really exposing herself. 

Five thousand years later they still haven’t even found out her true name, never mind her origins. But they come for her despite all that, _because_ of it. If they kill her, they break the backbone of the immortal collective, of those that have banded together in peace, instead of war.

Together, immortals are a formidable enemy, as five riders in the desert once proved beyond a shadow of a doubt. But a single immortal, no matter how terrifying, can be brought down. If they bring her down, the rest will scatter. 

That’s what they think.

They also think they’re subtle, but they’re not. The boy who trails her is green and still wet behind the ears, filled with zeal and hate, but not patience. He comes too close, hurries whenever she rounds a corner and twitches when she looks his way. 

He’s so pathetic that she finds herself hoping for this to be a trap. Anything else she might have to take as an insult.

She wanders aimlessly for almost three hours - because she is most certainly _not_ going home with the boy still sticking to her tail – when something finally happens. 

A van, screeching tires, traptraptrap, they pull her inside, knock her out and take off, leaving rubber.

She wakes soon, too soon, judging by the fact that there are no bullet holes in her body. But then she counted on that, always counts on being faster, stronger, better. One day, that arrogance will probably get her killed.

But not today. 

Today the ones that will die are the ones that tried to kill Darius, that went after Duncan and Fitz, slaughtered so many of her friends, so many of those who wanted peace instead of a game. It’s always the wrong people who have to die when people go mad.

She tests the chains that hold her and strains against them, feeling the links give and the metal scream in agony. Longest living slayer, older than the sand in the desert, and still strong. So strong. The chains snap not quite like thread but almost and the sound of it draws attention from one, two, three, four men who stare at her as if they’ve seen the devil.

Antichrist indeed, mother of those that do not die, queen of the desert, Sun of the end of all things. They know none of those titles but they feel them, taste them at the back of their throats, as mortals sometimes do in the presence of something far, far beyond their comprehension.

She smiles at them, quips in a cheery voice – her tribute to a girl long dead and a life almost forgotten – and swings the broken chain dangling from her left wrist to shatter a jaw. 

He goes down like a collapsing building while the others go for their guns. Cowards. Rule breakers. Oath breakers. The second falls to a broken nose and shattered bone shoved into his brain. The third gives off a shot that gets her in the shoulder and she grits her teeth as she brings him down, too.

One left.

The boy, the one that missed his tailing-people-without-being-painfully-obvious-about-it class. His gun wavers even as his eyes burn and she takes his legs out from under him, kicks his weapon out of reach and watches him scramble backwards.

She could let him live. She could say something meaningful and foreboding. Something about hunting all his friends down, about how there will be no place where they can hide from her. Something profound about the nature of beasts and immortals and how she’s not the unnatural freak here. 

But she won’t.

She still lives by one rule and one rule only and that rule has annexes and addendums and one of them says never leave a zealot at your back because he will kill you with his teeth and nails if he has to. 

So she grabs him by the ears, hauls him up and says, “Stupid boy.” 

She breaks his neck and lets his body drop. The silence afterward is deafening, echoing. It always is. She got used to it.

She kneels and starts frisking the men, memorizing their names so she can have Methos check the watcher’s employee list for known associates and whatnot. She finds the keys to the sad remains of the chains that didn’t hold her – could never have held her – and unlocks the cuffs, rubbing her wrists briefly. It’s more out of habit than actual pain because she heals faster than evil vampires in bad movies these days. 

She stays that way, on her knees, rubbing her wrists, staring blindly at the four men she just killed. 

Then, eventually, she moves, siphons the gas out of the car and uses it to douse the bodies, grabs her sword, flicks a lighter she took off the boy and walks out of the old warehouse as the smell of burning flesh starts to permeate the air. 

Outside she tucks away her weapon, makes sure she looks presentable and then starts walking. Maybe she can find a taxi a few blocks away, out of the warehouse district. It shouldn’t be too far. She thinks she’s been here before, on a walk on a restless night. 

She meanders slowly down the sidewalk, in no great hurry and never looking back. There was no doubt they would come after her. Not after they went after Darius and she ruined their plans for the priest. 

No doubt they would try to kill her. 

But she still hoped they wouldn’t. 

+

+

**Foresight**

+

“Come on, Ripper, weekend on the coast. Everyone’s going.”

Ripper shakes his head, holding up the book bag in his left hand while simultaneously trying to dislodge the dead weight of Ethan Rayne on his right shoulder. The man, unfortunately, is used to it and simply shifts with Ripper’s wriggling, laughing roughly in his ear. 

“I’ve got to do bloody homework,” Ripper says, shaking the bag for emphasis.

Ethan snorts, “Forget homework. We’re free and young and sexy.” He, too, emphasises his point. With his tongue in Ripper’s ear. 

“If I fail this course again, my old man will stop the money flow.”

“What d'we need money for anyway?” Rayne demands, still clinging to his friend, petulant and sullen.

“Booze,” Ripper suggests mildly, “Cigarettes. Drugs. Magic.”

“Food,” a new voice supplies and the multi limbed beast that is two young men turns to find Benjamin Adam casually leaning against the wall, watching them through the curtain of too long black fringe. It reaches the tip of his Roman nose, hides eyes that sometimes give Rupert chills. Not that he’d ever admit it. He’s pretty sure Ethan has a healthy dose of respect for the man, too. No-one’s ever made Ethan back down the way Ben does. Not even his lover. 

Ethan laughs again and asks, “Where’s your lovely wife, Ben?”

The other man pouts. “I knew you loved Summer more than me.”

“Bloody right. Her cooking’s better.”

An eyebrow rises in the shadow of hair, barely visible but radiating scepticism like few other things in this world. Ripper shifts again, hoping to get rid of his friend while he is distracted but no such luck. Bloody Ethan Rayne and his bloody ivy-genes. 

“Summer’s cooking consists of dragging anyone within reach to the nearest restaurant.”

Ethan jabs a finger in Ben’s direction and nods, digging his chin into Rupert’s shoulder. “Exactly. And she pays. Which is why we don’t need money for food. Speaking off, how about lunch?”

Ben shrugs and Ripper sighs long-sufferingly, but lets himself be dragged along by the arm as they make their way out of the building, across campus and into Gold Mike’s, where, Ripper is sure, they own at least half the tables by now.

Cherry, the waitress, brings their usual without even asking beforehand. She drops their drinks at their table, eyeing Ben as she always does and asks, a bit too obviously, “Your bird not comin’ today?”

Ben looks up at her, blatantly accepting the invitation of a low cleavage and a good angle before meeting her eyes and cocking his head to one side. “Ten,” he says. Cherry blinks. “Nine, eight, seven…”

He’s counting down. Ethan snorts into his beer, shaking his head and rolling his eyes at the desperate waitress and their amused friend. Really, this has been going on for months. 

And then the man reaches zero and the door opens, admitting a tiny blonde girl in a short skirt and high heels. Ben’s gaze settles on her like an old dog coming home and the others follow his example. Cherry falters and Ripper asks, “How the bloody hell do you do that, Adam? It’s like you’re hardwired into each other.”

Ben blinks and, without looking, supplies, “Magic.” 

Ripper grunts. It’s not magic. He knows. He checked. Twice. But somehow, those two always know when the other is about to enter a room. Hell’s bells, they wake up from it.

Summer saunters over to them, completely disregarding the sour waitress. Like she doesn’t matter. Like she’s a bug and nothing more. Summer carries arrogance as well as Ben carries his pride, all sway and swagger and damned if it doesn’t turn Ripper and Rayne on like school boys. People think they are the bad seeds of their little group, the ruthless rebels, but they’re not. Ben and Summer look presentable and nice and old school, but underneath they are animals and they don’t bother hiding it really well. 

The slight woman pecks both of them on the cheek before dropping into her husband’s lap with a happy sigh, kissing him hello. They stare at each other for a long moment during which Ripper knows, just knows, that he’s fading and flickering in the periphery of their vision. They see nothing but each other.

Ethan, knowing it too, carefully creeps a hand across the table, trying to snatch Ben’s beer while the man is otherwise occupied. A grin spreads across his face as his hand closes around the pint and then falls in the same instant, as another hand clamps down on his wrist. 

Ben’s eyebrow is up high again as he looks at Ethan intently over Summer’s shoulder. When he gets an apologetic grin he gives the wrist in his grasp one last squeeze, not too kindly, and lets it go. The other man pulls his hand back as if burned.

“So,” Summer asks, “What are you planning for the weekend, boys?”

“We’re going to the coast,” Ethan supplies.

Rupert groans and drops his forehead to the table.

+

Two days later Rupert finds himself sitting on a dreary, cold beach, sitting close enough to the camp fire to fry his arse. That is, if it weren’t frozen stiff already. The only thing making the whole excursion bearable is the amount of alcohol he has ingested and Summer sitting next to him, cuddling into his side for warmth.

It’s probably an entirely harmless heat seeking motion but he’s drunk off his head and she’s warm and close and solid in a way she never is when she’s teasing him and Ethan from Ben’s lap, when she’s telling them off for being reckless idiots, when she’s looking at him like he’s a bug, something to be studied and amused by. 

He hates when she looks at him like that but the occurrence has grown more frequent recently. It makes him angry as much as it fascinates him and he finds himself saying, without checking for permission with his brain first, “I want to fuck you.”

“No, you don’t,” she informs him, not even looking at him as she pushes his arm from her shoulders.

“Yes, I do.” He sets his bottle of beer down, wondering idly when Ben and Ethan will be back with more and wondering what they’ll say if they find him and Summer shagging like bunnies. The thought sends the sharp edge of excitement and adrenaline through his system and he roughly pulls the slight form of his friend closer, trying to kiss her.

She hisses in annoyance and pushes him away, sending him tumbling backwards over the log they’ve been sitting on. “Leave it, Ripper,” she orders him, coldly.

“Bitch,” he snarls, drunk and hurt and angry with her, so bloody pissed off he could spit bullets. How dare she, tiny little thing, always telling him to not do this and not do that. To not try that spell and not drink so much and not be so cruel to Ethan and the list goes on and on and on. And now she’s telling him no again and all he sees is red. 

“You bloody bitch. Think you’re better than me, do you?” His voice is low and threatening, even from where he’s sitting with his arse in the sand. 

“I’m thinking,” she informs him, entirely undisturbed by the glint of madness in his eyes, “That Ethan is going to crawl into a bottle and not come out for weeks if you hurt him again.”

That goddamn, bloody… how dare she bring up Ethan now? How dare she try and guilt Ripper into backing down by bringing up his lover? That little, manipulating, teasing – 

“Who’s hurting who?” a sunny voice asks to the left and Rupert almost gives himself whiplash as he turns to look at Ben, who stands there, casually, six pack of beer in each hand. He puts them down and wraps an arm around Summer – like she wouldn’t let Ripper do, like Ben is better than him somehow, like he has a right – and repeats his question.

Summer peeks around her husband’s frame and spots Ethan still a ways off, before saying, “Mr. Giles here has decided that he wants to sleep with me.”

Ripper closes his eyes and waits for the fist to break his nose. What comes instead is a rough hand at the scruff of his neck, hauling him up by the collar of his jacket and pushing him forward roughly. Then Ben’s arm settles around his neck in a deceptively friendly hold and the older man hisses, “You idiot. You’ve got someone who loves you like a drug right there.” He points vaguely at Ethan coming into the circle of fire light and adds, malignant and darkly amused, “Stop chasing things you’ll never have.”

Then he pushes and watches as Ripper collides with Rayne, sending both of them into the sand in an uncoordinated bundle of limbs. 

Ripper wants to scream but before he can, Ethan’s kissing him. 

+

“Bloody hell, Rayne, how suicidal are you?” Ripper hisses as he enters the Adams’ flat after his friend, the memory of Ben’s deep red hissing still ringing in his ear weeks later. The casual cruelty in his voice as he told Rupert Giles exactly what he would never have. What he was good enough for what he wasn’t good enough for. 

He always thought neither of the couple was seriously into spell casting, but after that night by the sea, he started to doubt. There was something _other_ about Ben, there, in the dark. 

Which is why it’s probably a rotten idea to break into his flat when he’s not there. Ethan doesn’t seem to think so, though. He simply jingles his lock picks and enters the living room, unconcerned. “Not like we’re stealing anything. Just waiting for them to get back. Not our fault they’re bloody late.”

“Ben’s going to murder you and I’ll help him hide the body,” is the only response Ripper gives as he sinks into the sofa, tired of his lover’s antics already. There are days when just being in the presence of the other man uses up all his - admittedly small to begin with - patience.

“Right,” Ethan confirms happily and starts meandering through the room before, predictably, zeroing in on the one door that’s always closed. The bedroom. Summer quite candidly informed them that, if she ever caught them snooping in there, she’d have their balls for Christmas decorations. The threat itself wasn’t particularly intimidating, mind you, but the bright, maniac grin that came with it spoke volumes. Ripper has always heeded the warning. Ethan on the other hand has the survival instincts of a lemming, happily running head first into certain doom at least three times a week and twice on Sundays. 

He throws a grin over his shoulder at the other man, not at all discouraged by the fact that his friend groans loudly, flings an arm over his eyes and lies down on his back, obviously refusing to participate in any way. With a shrug he pushes open the door and steps inside, irreverent of the fact that somehow, Summer will _know_ and he’ll sing soprano come the holiday season.

He disappears into the windowless room and for a few beats, there is only silence. Then, “Tits and bits, Ripper, get your arse in here!”

“No.” But there is something in Ethan’s voice that says he hasn’t found illicit sex toys and fetish wear but something else entirely. So when the other calls again, Ripper rolls to his feet and obeys.

The room is dim, as can be expected of a place without windows, but cosy. The bed dominates the centre of the room, dark and rich in colour. The rest of the furniture matches it. It looks like the townhouse Ripper fled on his eighteenth birthday, filled with disgust at the pretensions and arrogance of his forefathers. But that is not what has captured Ethan’s attention to the point of staring dumbly.

No, what catches Ripper’s eye upon entering the bedroom is the glint of steel and precious stones resting on the closed lid of a chest at the foot end of the bed. A sword. Son of a long line of watchers, he is in no way unfamiliar with weapons of this kind, but to find one here? In his friends’ bedroom? 

He steps closer and finally notices what has Ethan paling. Brown residue clinging to the bottom of the blade, as if whoever used it last has not yet gotten around to cleaning it properly. 

Cleaning it of blood.

Why do Summer and Ben have a bloody sword lying in their bedroom?

Of their own volition his fingers move, reaching, tentatively, as if afraid of contact, for the weapon.

“Careful,” a soft voice behind him suddenly warns and he jerks backward in surprise, stumbling, almost crashing into his friend. He whips around as soon as he regains his balance and blanches at the sight of Summer, small and golden and serious, leaning against the doorjamb, watching him detachedly. “It’s sharp.”

Beside Ripper, Ethan has gone pliant and wide-eyed, staring stupidly at the blonde. And at the shadow looming over her shoulder, the expression on his face fulfilling every promise his voice made on that beach.

“There’s blood on the blade,” Rupert finds himself saying, his mouth curiously detached from his brain.

“Maybe we’ve taken up animal sacrifice,” Ben suggests, voice smooth and steel-edged. 

“Have you?”

Summer moves backwards then, taking her husband with her, ordering, “Get out of here, idiots, before I remember my promise.”

Her voice is light again, as it should be, as it always has been in daylight and Ethan finally shakes off his stupor, grabbing his friend by the arm and dragging him toward the door of the flat. They both pretend not to notice the eyes boring into their backs as they walk as fast as they can without breaking into a run.

Down the hall, silently, down the stairs with enormous concentration and they don’t really breathe until they set foot outside the main entrance of the building, blinded by sunlight.

Then they look at each other, feeling silly and paranoid, stupid and childish and the idea of the darkness in Ben's eyes, of the edge to Summer's movements seems ridiculous and idiotic. They smoke too much weed. The entire situation is unreal suddenly and they start laughing. Loudly. Hysterically.

For the next week, Ethan keeps humming the Addams Family theme under his breath whenever either of the Adams is around. They never see the sword again.

+

“Ripper,” Ethan says as he dumps a stack of loose papers and smudged notes on the table in front of his lover and sits down, waving Cherry over for a beer. 

“Yes, Rayne?”

“I think I found a way to solve the problem of Daddy turning off the money flow.”

“Oh?” Rupert leans forward around his bottle, pulling the stack closer to take a look at them. The topmost sheet is a grainy copy of an old original text, the _Encyclopaedia Demonica_. 

The title at the top of the page is made up of a single word. 

_Eyghon_

+

Summer and Ben spend long moments looking through the papers, checking and rechecking the notes, comparing them, working out for themselves just what Ripper and Rayne are planning now.

“You need a lot of people for this,” Summer finally says, leaning back in her chair.

“The Coven is going to help. They already agreed.”

“You think you can do this? A bunch of college kids summoning a demon? You’ll get killed faster than you can say shite.” Ben informs them, leaning back as well, wrapping an arm around the blonde at his side.

Ripper snorts angrily. “Don’t sound so bloody conceited, arsehole.”

Summer interrupts before an argument can spring up. “You don’t bind demons, Ripper. Demons bind you. You do this, you’re as good as dead. All of you.”

“Are you scared?”

Ben opens his mouth, about to snarl at them undoubtedly, but his wife’s hand on his arm stops him. “Let’s not fight. It’s time, Ben. Let’s go home.”

It’s not that late, barely two in the morning, but there is a lilt and a tilt to Summer’s words, to the way she says _it’s time_. Ben nods and they both get up, grabbing their jackets.

Ben slaps both men on the back while Summer pecks first Ethan and then Rupert on the cheek. Then, in an unfamiliar show of tenderness she cups his jaw in her hand and looks him in the eye for a long moment.

“Love her.”

“What?”

“When you find her, love her. She needs that more than anything else. Love her.”

“Who the hell are you talking about?”

She pulls back, the gentle manner gone from her frame and face as suddenly as it entered and she smirks as she links her arm with Ben’s. 

“You’ll know,” she says.

+

The next day, when Ripper and Rayne go looking for them, they find only an empty flat and no forwarding address. 

Twenty years later the man once known as Ripper looks into the face of a young, air headed blonde and he knows.

+

+

**Observe**

+

She has no idea why she’s here. 

She’s sure that she had a reason, in the beginning, but now… it just seems silly. She sits on the back of a worn bench in a dry park, watching children chase each other over the burnt, yellowish grass. 

What’s she doing here? What does she think she will find, will gain? She doesn’t remember this day. Didn’t even remember the address. She had to look it up in the phone book and then wait and lurk in order to… to get here.

And now she’s here.

She’s here in 1989 in a park in a Los Angeles suburb, watching children play games whose rules she forgot thousands of years ago. “Shit,” she mutters to herself. “Shit.”

A child, a redheaded boy of maybe six, stumbles and falls, managing to skin his knee on the only patch of gravel in the entire playground. His mother rushes to his side, fussing over him like he is about to lose his leg and setting him off. His wails rise to the heavens and she runs a hand through her hair, thanks several deities that she will never have kids and wonders why _she is here_.

Another body disengages from the gaggle of parents and nannies and turns in her direction. Her face, framed by dirty blonde curls, painted in pastel blue and pink, is achingly familiar in an entirely unfamiliar way.

Unbidden, a word rises to Sun’s lips. _Mommy_. She swallows it with a shake of her head. Her mother is nothing but dust and a faded memory. Besides, she’s too old to cry in Mommy’s lap. 

The woman treks around the perimeter of the playground, sidling ever closer until she’s standing in front of Sun, eyeing her critically but not malevolently as most mothers in this area would. 

In tight, ripped jeans and a faded band shirt, her hair streaked in rainbow colours, wearing cheap silver jewellery and cheaper plastic bangles, she looks like she belongs anywhere but in suburbia. She also looks painfully young, as evidenced by the fact that an elderly lady started harping on Methos the other week for robbing the cradle. It didn’t help when they both cracked up. 

But Sun enjoys losing herself in fashions and stereotypes, in becoming a face in the faceless crowd of youth. Sometimes simply being herself seems like too much work. 

The woman hesitates a moment, then seems to convince herself that the blonde on the bench is unlikely to knife her to death in broad daylight and asks, “Do I know you?”

Sun blinks at her expressively and whimpers inside her head. _It’s me, Mommy. Your baby girl._

“It’s just that, your face. I could have sworn I’ve seen you before. Do you live around here?”

She shakes her head. “Sorry,” she finds herself offering without reason. What is she apologizing for? _For not being there when you died alone in your living room from… from… what’s gonna kill you Mommy?_

Right. She has to get out of here. Now. 

“Never mind,” Joyce Summers says and smiles awkwardly. Sun fumbles for the pack of cigarettes in her back pocket, slaps one into her palm and lights it with hands that are steady despite the end of the world inside her head. She makes no move to leave.

“I…,” Joyce blushes under her tan and fidgets a bit before turning to check on her daughter by the swings. The child is happily oblivious to anything but _higher higher_ and she turns back, saying, “The hell. Can I bum one of those?”

Sun, startled into laughter because here her not-mother is bumming cigarettes off her like a teenager, nods and hands the other woman one, followed by her lighter. 

“I shouldn’t,” Joyce says after the first drag, “Stopped as soon as I found out I was pregnant and never started again but sometimes…”

Sun nods, “I know the feeling.” 

She doesn’t, actually, because her metabolism flushes out drugs faster than she can keep them coming, but it’s all the same and nothing matters. The older looking of the two women sits next to her on the bench. Sun slips down to sit properly and for a few minutes they smoke in silence.  
Then, “Which one’s yours?” _What did I look like, Mommy?_

Immediately, Joyce points, notices that she’s waving about her borrowed cigarette, lowers her hand and raises the other. “The dirty blonde girl, by the swings. She’s eight.”

Sun follows the outstretched hand and finds herself in pigtails and a pink My Pony shirt, finds herself across a gap of several thousand years and wonders, for just a moment, what would happen if she stood up right now, walked over there and touched herself. Maybe the sun will crash and the world implode. Maybe the universes will collapse into each other and this will all be over. 

She drops her cigarette, grinds it into the dust with the heel of her shoe and makes herself sit still. Joyce imitates her and asks, “What about you? Here with a sibling?”

Sun’s mouth opens and the lie rises to her lips, automatically, smoothly. She’s just visiting. Her parents live down the road. She used to play here. She’s hiding from her boyfriend. Anything. Everything. All lies. And they stop, right there, trapped behind lips and teeth. 

She can’t say it. 

She can’t lie to Mommy and finally she understands why her kind is usually not born. Why they are always changelings, foundlings, never born as flesh from flesh, never blood related to anyone. 

It’s easier.

Joyce misinterprets her silence, hastens to apologize. “Oh, I’m sorry. Do you have a kid of your own? You just look so young but I shouldn’t be making assumptions and I…”

“No,” Sun cuts across the other woman, smiling mildly. “No kid. I’m just…” _looking for you, trying to remember who I am, chasing my past, wanting to understand, killing myself very slowly by looking at you and not remembering what you’ll look like in ten years, how you die, what your favourite colour is._ “…just sort of… wandering.”

Joyce laughs. “And you landed in a playground?”

“I don’t remember having been to one as a kid,” Sun says, tries to stop the words, fails. She never should have fucking come here. Where’s Methos when you need him? “I mean, I must have, but I can’t remember. I think I was happy then.”

Could she sound any more pathetic? Not if she tried. 

There’s a hand on her shoulder suddenly, warm and solid and so, so familiar. She might whimper but she’s not sure. 

“I’m sorry,” Joyce whispers, her voice barely audible above the shrieks coming from the see-saw. 

“Not your fault.”

The hand remains for a minute longer and then withdraws, slowly. “Are you sure I don’t know you from somewhere?” she asks again and Sun keeps her mouth tightly shut because if she doesn’t, she’ll answer and it’ll be the truth. Why does she do this to herself? How could she be so stupid, coming here, thinking, pretending….

“God, woman, you’re hard to find.”

Methos’ hands land on her shoulders like a warning, heavy and more real than the woman beside her, or maybe less. The other woman jerks around, unlike Sun, who simply slumps and doesn’t look at him at all. “Thought you were going to spend another week in Paris.”

She can feel him shrug before he lets go of her and steps over the back of the bench and sits down on it, his knees on either side of her. Automatically, she leans into him. Joyce watches the interaction with a curious expression, obviously taking in their differences, casually but expensively dressed guy in his mid-thirties, rebel girl no older than twenty, snuggled together in old familiarity.

“What are we watching?” Methos asks quietly.

Sun fixes her gaze on a black haired boy in the sandbox and makes herself not say a word. Joyce smiles awkwardly and doesn’t know whether or not to answer the question obviously not meant for her.

What are they watching? A girl that isn’t her, a mother that’s not Mommy but enough of her to make her heart stutter in her chest, a memory that was forgotten before today, a child in the glare of the afternoon heat that looks nothing, moves nothing, _is_ nothing like the Sun. The past. The future. Memory and hope and dreams that are nothing more than faded charcoal sketches in her mind. _Look what I made for you, Mommy!_

They are strangers, her and that girl by the swings, have nothing in common. Sun wants to say something important, something meaningful. She wants to give Joyce a clue, a warning of the future, something to make it all better. If she could only remember what killed Mommy. But she can’t and there are no words for this.

“Nothing,” she says, laying her head on Methos’s thigh and closing her eyes.

+

+

**Bronze**

+

“What is this?” Caspian demands, swinging the weapon in an arc, testing its heft and weight. He’s still standing over the body of the man who wielded it. Who killed him with it. 

Which, Sun decides, explains why the man body looks brutalized. Caspian gets pissed at being murdered. 

Then, finally, his words register and she looks up. Looks up and barks out a startled laugh. It’s a sword. Crude, blunt, badly made, but it’s a sword. A _metal_ sword, shimmering dull brown in the light, but recognizable all the same. 

The Bronze Age. The words, long forgotten, in a language she hasn’t spoken in thousand of years, flit unbidden through her head. Every time she’s convinced herself she’s forgotten about Before, something triggers her and suddenly, the memories will be back. 

The Bronze Age. The words have barely any meaning, an abstract concept that never had any bearing on her life, but they still clung to some cobwebbed corner of her head, apparently. There is another flicker of memory, something more personal linked to the words. Warm lights and dark rooms, pounding music. She shoves it away.

With a deft movement, she flicks the pommel of the sword, sending it from Caspian’s hand into the air, where she catches it, falling into old forms almost automatically. It’s terribly balanced, too heavy down the middle and the hilt is badly shaped for a human hand. The tip is blunt and there is no crossguard at all. It’s basically a piece of shit. It’s also the height of modern technology. 

Kronos appears at her back, slinging an arm around her shoulders, his face next to hers. “It looks like a knife. What’s it made off?”

“No idea,” Caspian answers, trying to make a grab for it. “My spoils. Give it to me.”

Sun laughs, spins it faster, wondering if it’ll sharpen well. It won’t hold an edge, she can tell that already, but proper bladed weapons exist again. It’s lovely. 

“It looks like this stuff,” Methos announces as he joins them, flinging down a clump of… is that ore, followed by an entire sack of it. “Found it by the fire. These people came from far away.”

Silas, trailing after him, nods his agreement, muttering something about their faces looking wrong. As if all of them don’t wear faces wrong for this continent. 

Not that anyone, besides Sun, has a concept of what a continent is. And even she doesn’t remember, most of the time. There are stretches of time now, centuries and beyond, where all she knows is all she learned in this world. 

She gets lost in it. 

“Whatever it is,” Kronos announces, “I want one. Are there more?” 

Methos points, so Kronos presses a sloppy, excited kiss to Sun’s jaw and lets go, marching off with determination in his stride. Caspian, still angry at being killed, picks that moment to lunge at Sun, taking her out at the knees and grappling for the weapon. She laughs, hits him with the pommel and holds it over her head, where Methos snatches it, a mocking grin in his voice as he announces, “Oh, nice. I think I’ll keep it.”

Teeth bared, Caspian lunges again, howling and hitting. Silas crouches next to the fight, laughing. Sun joins him, leaning against his bulk. He smells of sweat, blood and the horses they’ve recently taken to keeping. 

Recently. It might be a century, by now, for all that she keeps track. They make travel easier. That’s all she needs to know. After a moment, the scuffle loses its fascination to Silas, who turns to her and offers up a bundle he was keeping close to his chest. 

“Found something,” he tells her, holding it out like an offering. “Keep it?”

She shifts enough to unfold the bundle and finds two puppies inside. They’re tiny, their eyes barely open. “Where’s the bitch?” she asks.

He grins broadly. “She almost bit off my fingers!”

Dead, then. “They’ll need goat milk,” she tells him, because for all that Silas has an instinctual understanding and gentleness for animals he utterly lacks for humans, he sometimes forget key components of caring for mortal creatures. Like how to feed them.

He nods, huddling the whelps close to his chest again. “Neena’s baby is big now. I’ll take her goat.”

“Give her something for it,” she orders him. Technically, they don’t need to bargain. Anything that belongs to one of their tribe belongs to all, but this is the kind of thing that keeps things going smoothly. And it reminds the boys that to their people, they aren’t gods and can’t act like it. 

Silas thinks for a long moment. “She can have one of the puppies. When it’s big. For the baby.”

Neena’s alone, her man dead before the baby came, so a guard dog will be useful. It’s a good trade. Sun nods. Over her head, Silas refocuses on the scuffle, grimaces and sticks out his tongue. She can guess what that means. Sex confuses him as much as almost all other human interaction. 

He stands, careful to keep his spoils steady. Kronos and Caspian will tease him mercilessly. An entire settlement and he takes two mewling pups. But they’ll make him happy long after they’ve fucked away all their own spoils. 

“Goat,” he announces and hastily turns around to get away. 

Sun looks around, finds most of their people in the vicinity beating a hasty retreat as Methos, sitting astride a prone Caspian, starts stripping off his armor while Caspian claws at the fastenings of his clothing, right there in the dirt. Both their mouth are smeared red. Someone bit. She scoots closer to sit next to them, watching. 

They’re as pretty as they’ve vicious and she’ll get her man back once Caspian is done. Or maybe, in a bit, she’ll find Kronos. Or help Silas with his puppies. 

They’ll spend the night here and move on in the morning, armed with swords they’ve never had before, just as hungry, just as aimless as today and yesterday and a thousand years ago. And they’ll keep at it until the world finally, finally finds a way to stop them. 

But that day isn’t today. 

Today, Methos laughs into a kiss Caspian bites into his mouth and Sun watches them, a sword made of metal lying in the sand a few feet away, an ominous sign of times changing. 

But not yet. 

+

+

**Homeward Bound**

+

For a moment, after opening the door, Ethan stands there, staring. 

Short and blonde and green-eyed. Like the little girl who bought a silly, frilly dress from his shop a few days ago, but not. Her face is slimmer, baby fat gone, her tan darker. Her hair more honey than gold, longer and straighter. She’s lost some curves, gained others, holds her shoulders straighter and her head taller. 

Her hands are elegant instead of childish and her smile is sharper than any blade. 

“You know,” he tells her, conversationally, “I’d half convinced myself I was imagining the likeness. Especially since Ripper seemed to not see it at all.”

She snorts, then points at his black eyes and swollen cheek. “He do that?”

“With a set of brass knuckles,” Ethan confirms, as if this isn’t the first time in twenty years he’s seen her. As if they’re still at that pub by the university, drinking and talking.

She hasn’t aged.

But then, twenty years of sniffing around the watchers’ archives have pretty much answered that question, already. 

He swings the door wider, a silent invitation. There is a reason she’s here, now, at his door after two decades, only hours after a kitten of a girl with her face almost cost him everything. After Ripper. 

She steps inside and immediately grabs his arm to haul him onto the bed of the hotel room he’s been calling his own, inspecting his ruined face with careful fingers. “Christ, he did a number on you.”

“Ripper never did take well to people displeasing him,” he offers, trying not to wince as she probes. Then he asks a question that’s been burning on his tongue since he saw the little slayer’s face. “Did you know? What would happen?”

Eyghon and all their dead friends. 

“I warned you, didn’t I?”

Yes, she did. But he was young and stupid and he wanted, more than anything, to find a way to make Ripper stay. Instead he did the opposite. 

“How?”

She shrugs as she gives up her inspection and sits next to him, close enough to feel her body heat. She used to hang off him all the time, he remembers, sit on his lap. Until Ripper started to take it as permission to do the same. Only Ethan always knew Summer was only a friend and Ripper never did. 

He’s old and raw and still as stupid as he ever was, but he’s glad he’s here, even if he has no idea why. 

“Time travel,” she offers, without fanfare. “The loop’s almost closed now. A few more years…,” she trails off, fingering a pendant hanging under her shirt. Then she suddenly perks up. “Okay. Pack your crap, we’re getting out of here.”

“What? Why?”

“Because if you stay, Ripper’s going to shred you next time,” she tells him, starts gathering his things into a pile on the bed without asking for permission. 

Ethan blanks for a moment. Then, “Did you come here for the sole purpose of… fetching me?”

She pauses, startled, and blinks at him. “You’re our friend, Ethan. We left because it was getting too close to events I knew about. But they’re done now. Your part in this story is over. No more reason to stay away.”

Ethan has to take a very deep breath and squeeze his eyes shut, tightly, despite the pain. Because it’s been a shit day. He came here for a little chaos, a little fun, hoping to goad Ripper into… something. 

Well, he got that. Got his face smashed in by the man he loves. Loved. For something Ripper would have once laughed at, would have gladly helped Ethan. And now here Summer is, a ghost of years long past, of better times, and she’s… kind. She came for him, for _only_ him, the way he spent the past twenty years dreaming Rupert would, but never did. 

Shakily, he exhales. 

“I thought this was my chance, you know,” he tells her, unbidden, watching her flit about the room. “Finally, he’s away from the Council. He’s free again. I thought I’d….” But Ripper’s just as much of an angry bastard as he always was. Except that now he’s ashamed of it and that’s made him even more vicious. 

She pauses, a stack of shirts in hand. “I’m sorry, Ethan. But it’ll never… you try a few more times. In my time. But he just keeps turning you down.”

“Thank you,” he blurts, finally standing, taking his clothes from her. 

“For what?”

“For coming. Is Ben-“

“Downstairs. In the car. He goes by Adam now.”

“Both of you?”

“Mhm?”

“Immortal.”

She jerks. He manages half a smirk before the bruise on his cheek pulls too tight. “I’m a watcher, love. I figured it out after a few years confined to ‘menial tasks’ in the archives.”

She laughs, but nods. “Both of us.”

Together, they pile his belongings into a single suitcase. Then she takes his hand, presses a careful kiss to the unbruised side of his face and tugs him toward the door. “Come on. We’re going home.”

+

+

**Author's Note:**

> If there's something else you'd like to see, let me know. Please leave a comment on your way out the door. Thank you. 
> 
> (I've kind of made myself like Ethan Rayne. What the hell?)


End file.
